World Youth Skills Day falls on Wednes­day, Ju­ly 15. The theme is: “Skills for a Shared Fu­ture.”

The UN re­minds us that the world of work is chang­ing rapid­ly. It is im­por­tant to equip youths with the skills they need for em­ploy­ment, de­cent work and en­tre­pre­neur­ship.

“To thrive in this chang­ing land­scape, young peo­ple need more than tech­ni­cal skills alone. They need a bal­anced set of com­pe­ten­cies that com­bines tech­ni­cal, dig­i­tal, AI, green, so­cial-emo­tion­al and civic skills with the hu­man qual­i­ties that tech­nol­o­gy can­not re­place” (UN).

We need “in­no­v­a­tive youth skills pro­grammes—ini­tia­tives that em­pow­er young peo­ple not on­ly to adapt, but to lead with em­pa­thy, bridge cul­tur­al di­vides, build re­silience, and ac­tive­ly shape a more sus­tain­able and in­clu­sive to­mor­row” (UN).

Ac­cord­ing to the ILO, there are 1.2 bil­lion young peo­ple aged 15–24 years in the world—16 per cent of the glob­al pop­u­la­tion.

“Youth around the globe con­tin­ue to face sig­nif­i­cant bar­ri­ers to de­cent work. Ap­prox­i­mate­ly one in five young peo­ple were not in em­ploy­ment, ed­u­ca­tion or train­ing in 2023. This sit­u­a­tion was even more crit­i­cal for young women, who were twice as like­ly as young men to not be in em­ploy­ment, ed­u­ca­tion or train­ing…it is im­per­a­tive to en­gage young peo­ple di­rect­ly in shap­ing the poli­cies and pro­grammes.”

Even for those who work, de­cent jobs re­main scarce.

“Over half of young work­ers are in in­for­mal em­ploy­ment, and in low-in­come coun­tries, three in four hold on­ly self-em­ploy­ment or tem­po­rary jobs” (UN).

T&T is de­vel­op­ing youth skills for the fu­ture through the Min­istry of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice (MYDNS) and the Na­tion­al Youth Pol­i­cy (2020-2025). MYDNS has ex­pand­ed its frame­works through com­ple­men­tary poli­cies, in­clud­ing a Na­tion­al Youth Em­ploy­ment Pol­i­cy, es­tab­lished along­side Cipri­ani Col­lege. The youth co­hort has been widened from 12–29 to 10–35 years.

T&T pro­vides na­tion­al ap­pren­tice­ships, tech­ni­cal train­ing, dig­i­tal and lead­er­ship de­vel­op­ment, and in­tern­ships to en­sure young cit­i­zens are pre­pared for a rapid­ly evolv­ing glob­al econ­o­my.

Ini­tia­tives in­clude:

Tech­ni­cal and Vo­ca­tion­al Ed­u­ca­tion (TVET): The Youth Train­ing and Em­ploy­ment Part­ner­ship Pro­gramme, and Youth De­vel­op­ment Ap­pren­tice­ship Cen­tres.

In­tern­ships and Work­force Readi­ness: On-the-Job Train­ing Pro­gramme, which places trainees aged 16–35 for up to 24 months, and the Fu­ture Lead­ers In­tern­ship Pro­gramme—a four-week hy­brid (vir­tu­al and in-per­son) ini­tia­tive host­ed by TSTT (bmo­bile) in part­ner­ship with the Min­istry of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion and Skills Train­ing and NI­HERST. The three ca­reer streams are: tech­nol­o­gy, in­no­va­tion and ro­bot­ics; dig­i­tal me­dia and con­tent cre­ation; and dig­i­tal growth and techno­pre­neur­ship.

Lead­er­ship and Civic En­gage­ment: Na­tion­al Youth Am­bas­sadors Pro­gramme, and the Na­tion­al Lead­er­ship Train­ing Pro­gramme (MYDNS, de­liv­ered by UWI).

Com­mu­ni­ty and Non-Gov­ern­men­tal Sup­port: Youth For Change TT and NGO ini­tia­tives, in­clud­ing pro­grammes run by the YM­CA, Pro­man Foun­da­tion and NGC. These in­clude sports, lead­er­ship and cod­ing.

Pro­man Foun­da­tion Cod­ing Pro­gramme’s re­cent clos­ing cer­e­mo­ny cel­e­brat­ed the achieve­ments of stu­dents who em­braced tech­nol­o­gy, cre­ativ­i­ty and prob­lem-solv­ing through cod­ing and com­pu­ta­tion­al think­ing. TTT re­port­ed that “com­mit­ment to youth de­vel­op­ment is re­flect­ed across the Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties and its agen­cies through ini­tia­tives such as T&TEC’s SPARK Pro­gramme, TSTT’s FLIP Pro­gramme and WASA’s Youth Sym­po­sium, all of which pro­vide young peo­ple with op­por­tu­ni­ties to learn, in­no­vate and pre­pare for the ca­reers of to­mor­row.”

De­spite strong course “take-up” rates, em­ploy­ers are call­ing for com­pre­hen­sive trac­er stud­ies to en­sure that the high course par­tic­i­pa­tion trans­lates di­rect­ly to sus­tain­able eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty and tech­ni­cal re­ten­tion in the labour mar­ket.

It is im­por­tant to ad­dress the needs of those who are out of school.

Glob­al­ly, 273 mil­lion chil­dren and young peo­ple are out of school. Ac­cord­ing to Chart­ing the Globe, a da­ta and an­a­lyt­ics plat­form that com­piles glob­al sta­tis­tics and in­di­ca­tors for coun­tries world­wide, the num­ber of chil­dren out of school in T&T cur­rent­ly stands at 47,132, re­flect­ing an in­crease of 34,763 (281.0 per cent) since 2010.

UNICEF re­ports that, be­cause of ad­min­is­tra­tive and le­gal bar­ri­ers, over 6,000 mi­grant chil­dren on the move in T&T are cur­rent­ly un­able to ac­cess our ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

Ap­prox­i­mate­ly 80 per cent of these chil­dren re­main com­plete­ly out of school and lack ac­cess to any for­mal or in­for­mal ed­u­ca­tion­al sup­port pro­grammes.

While T&T’s Gov­ern­ment shift­ed poli­cies to al­low reg­is­tered mi­grant chil­dren in­to pub­lic pri­ma­ry schools, doc­u­men­ta­tion hur­dles, such as ac­quir­ing cer­ti­fied and trans­lat­ed birth cer­tifi­cates, mean thou­sands still re­main locked out of for­mal learn­ing.

UNICEF has part­nered with lo­cal groups to run Child-Friend­ly Spaces (CF­Ss) across T&T. CF­Ss pro­vide cru­cial ser­vices, in­clud­ing:

• Psy­choso­cial sup­port

• Ba­sic ed­u­ca­tion and Eng­lish lan­guage class­es

UNICEF con­tin­ues to pro­vide fund­ing and sup­port for the DAWERE dis­tance-learn­ing pro­gramme in T&T.

Let’s equip all our youth with the skills they need.