Sarai’s story reminds me of youth around the world and the
youth problem facing the world today. With the largest population of youth ever
in history, youth who are unschooled and unemployed are susceptible to
contributing to increases in teenage pregnancies, violence, poverty, etc. Other
youth problems include the urban-rural divide, delayed marriage, age/gender
discrimination, etc. According to the 2012 UN World Youth Report, in
2009, the global youth unemployment rate saw a peak at 75.8 million unemployed
youth. In 2010, the global youth unemployment rate was 12.6%. And in 2011, the
UK’s unemployed youth numbers reached 1 million where the youth unemployment
rates in Spain and Greece were 48.9 and 45.1% respectively. So it is a problem
in developed and developing economies alike.
You know, however, that I don’t like to share sad stories
alone. I like to find the stories of hope sometimes hidden among the heaps of
bad news. The United Nation Foundation
has a programme called the Girl Up campaign
in which American girls are invited to raise funds for other girls around the developing
world. It’s one thing for someone older than you or further along than you to
give you help, but it is even more powerful when like-minded people who have
clear commonalities help each other, when a peer helps you. So I love the idea
of girls helping other girls. If you think adolescents and youth have problems,
consider adding the associated challenges of being female in certain parts of
the world. I hate that there are girls who experience the
lack of education due to taking care of the food/water and dealing with all the
household issues; I hate how girls are abused and raped, how they must go
through forced marriages at young ages, how they deal with "female
circumcision" which—let’s be honest—is just genital mutilation, and how
they are prostituted around the world. From a lack of sanitary pads to fistulas,
from higher HIV susceptibility to beatings, from human trafficking to lack of
family planning education, from early childbirth to lack of control over birth
control, finances, and savings. Study after study has shown that one of the
most effective interventions you can perform in international development work
is educating a girl because it affects so many things. Through Girl Up around
the world, girls who struggle to see a doctor or to enroll in school are
provided with access to school supplies, health services, clean water, safety
from violence, and more. Read the story of Priyanka Jain,
an 18-year-old teen advisor to the UN Foundation Girl Up Campaign and founder
and president of iCAREweCARE.
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