The Education Development Center has produced a cross-sectoral assessment of the Youth of Yemen, as part of a EQUIP3 USAID-funded initiative. The Yemen Stability Initiative (YSI) endeavors to address alienation among disaffected, disenfranchised, vulnerable youth ages 15–24. It addresses their difficulties through an array of activities and programs to increase their civic participation, life skills competence, health, violent extremism management and mitigation capabilities, and livelihood opportunities.

The study focused on key youth issues:

• Stability
• Unstable Economy
• Population Pressures and Growing Youth Bulge
• Rising Rates of Youth Unemployment
• Illiteracy and Educational Attainment
• A Wide Range of Health Concerns

In this report, the Middle East Youth Initiative cautions that a new jobs crisis may damage future prospects for the region’s young people. For Middle Eastern economies, the global downturn coincides with a historically high share of 15- to 29-year-olds in the total population. This report shows that, even during the “boom” years of 2002 to 2008, young people in the Middle East did not benefit from high-quality education and struggled to find decent jobs. Now, with labor markets already under pressure to generate employment for record numbers of graduates, the region faces a new set of challenges due to the global downturn and its affects on oil prices, exports, remittances, and foreign investment. For Middle Eastern economies to emerge stronger, policies forged during the downturn must be consistent with long-term goals of cultivating a skilled workforce, expanding the role of the private sector, and reducing the appeal of government employment.

This report stems from a study initiated by the United Nations Children’s Fund’s East Asia and Pacific Regional Office (UNICEF-EAPRO). The objective of the study was threefold: to improve the knowledge base on children affected by armed conflict, to devise protection strategies for children in situations of low-intensity conflict, and to involve participation of children and young people. Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Thai-Myanmar border were selected as the areas for study.

This report reviews the evidence on conditional cash transfers (CCTs) — safety net programs that have become popular in developing countries over the last decade. This report considers the impact that CCTs have had on current poverty, education, health, and nutrition outcomes. It draws heavily on a large number of carefully constructed impact evaluations of CCT programs to conclude that CCTs generally have been successful in reducing poverty and encouraging parents to invest in the health and education of their children, while recognizing that even the best-designed and best-managed program cannot fulfill all of the needs of a comprehensive social protection system.

This note from the World Bank PREMnotes series summarizes available research on the impact of schooling and employment of adolescent girls and young women on earnings and poverty reduction, demographic outcomes, child development outcomes, and female empowerment. It focuses on the fact that advances in gender parity between girls and boys in education are not matched by similar increased in equity in school-to-work transitions. It identifies key implications of this research for the formulation of public policy.’

This study is a companion to an earlier study on Gender and Conflict in Mindanao that was heavily focused on the impact of armed conflict on women (including young women), and stems from a need to understand the situation of young men in the context of the conflict in Mindanao. It also complements a study conducted in early 2005 that examines the impact of the conflict on men, women and youth in five provinces of Mindanao.