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Young volunteersJust as this years Leaving Cert results arrived, the ESRI published a study that examined the post-Leaving Cert experiences of 750 young Irish people. One stark finding is that "almost half expressed regrets about the pathway they had taken. Their regrets reflected difficulties in accessing employment, not having the ‘points’ to obtain their preferred course, and courses not being what they expected."

This backs up the opinions that many young people express to me. "'T’was a waste of four years", said the young receptionist at my vets office about her business degree. I countered with the usual "Ah, but it will stand to you in years to come and didn’t you have a fun four years in college?" She wasn't impressed.

A Kenyan reality television show is working to plug the gap between smallholder farmers and researchers — and has the potential to boost crop yields for millions of viewers and generate millions for rural communities, according to its creator.

Shamba Shape-Up (Shamba is the Swahili word for 'small farm') combines celebrity presenters and upbeat music with expert advice on soil fertility, disease prevention, solar energy and financing.

Over the next 10 years, Africa will have created about 122 million new jobs, says the World Bank Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa Report. Although this is a very exciting forecast, mass job availability alone won’t be enough to address the unemployment issues in Africa, especially when the new jobs are not proportional to the influx of unemployed youth. Furthermore, the pace at which these jobs are being created falls short of the rate of youth entering the job market per year. During the next ten years that it takes for Africa to finally create the new jobs, eleven million youth will have been entering the labor market each year.

While education has its role in ensuring a productive working class, it too doesn’t seem to be the only antidote for the continent’s unemployed youth. Today, the average Ghanaian or Zambian youth has more schooling than an average French or Italian in 1960. Despite this being the most educated generation Africa has ever seen (the region’s primary school completion rate increased from 51 percent in 1990 to 70 percent in 2011), they are still largely disadvantaged in the job hunt. During the stiff competition for jobs with contracts, employers tend to favor those with more work experience. By no fault of their own, many educated young people are often shortlisted due to lack of exposure to the labor market.

The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation – ACP/EU (CTA), in collaboration with the Caribbean Council for Science and Technology (CCST), The Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), The University of the West Indies (UWI), Columbus Communications Trinidad Limited (FLOW Trinidad) and the Trinidad & Tobago Film Company, launched the second Caribbean Science and Agriculture Film and Video Competition in October 2013. The main objective of this competition is to encourage the use of ICTs by young professionals in improving the environment for agricultural science and innovation in the Caribbean region.

CTA, CCST and partners are pleased to announce that we have received 36 videos from eight countries for the 2013/2014 Caribbean Science and Agriculture film and video competition “Adding Value to Local Foods”.

The Gender Community of UN Solution Exchange, the Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Youth Development (RGNIYD), Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu and Bahá’í Office of Public Affairs, New Delhi are pleased to announce their joint initiative of Using Social Media Online Platforms –Blogs; Face Book; You Tube; Twitters – to facilitate a Discourse on Youth Perspectives on Development

This is the first time that the Gender Community, RGNIYD and the Bahá’í Office of Public Affairs India will use multiple social media platforms to engage online - in a month-long discussion/debate – with the Youth of this country.

Time to make sure young people help to rewrite the rules of developmentIt’s not always immediately obvious why young people should care about effective development co-operation. Even for those in development circles, it has been the inclusive and broad-based process of shaping the next Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the “what” of development – that has perhaps most captured the imagination.

But there’s a provocative argument going around. It goes something like this: over past months, the development community has been transfixed with and channelled its energy into shaping the SDGs, with each actor lobbying hard for specific causes like gender, disability, or inequality. But now that the shape of the Goals is starting to emerge in the latest results from the Open Working Group, it’s looking possible that history will judge the biggest changes to have come not in what the world wants by way of development, but on how it delivers it.

Washington, August 11, 2014—Educating, empowering, and employing the largest-ever generation of young people is vital to ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity—the World Bank Group's twin corporate goals. New impact evaluation (IE) briefs by the World Bank Group (WBG), released ahead of International Youth Day 2014, shed new light on what works in development interventions targeting girls and young women, who still account for a disproportionate share of the world’s poor and face persistent inequalities at home, school, and work that help keep them and their families in poverty.

These briefs are accessible through en GENDER IMPACT, a resource point capturing World Bank Group gender-related IEs from January 2000 onward. enGENDER IMPACT aims to support global knowledge-sharing and uptake of key lessons and to encourage more and better impact evaluations on key gender topics. The briefs address critical issues for today’s youth: education, child marriage, and sexual and reproductive health.

Do you enjoy blogging and interviewing? Is environmental sustainability important to you? Then you are the person we need!

We, Wetlands International, are looking for bloggers who wish to blog at our upcoming 60th anniversary Global Stakeholder Forum and evening reception on 22 September 2014 in Rotterdam.