The Huffington Post and The World Economic Forum made a post about digital economy and it’s ability to help to understand and reduce youth unemployment. As mentioned in the post, upstarts like Uber, Airbnb, Kickstarter and Square are proving that technology pioneers win more and more consumers over with innovative thinking. This raises the question of how such market solutions can be used to tackle some of society's most pressing issues such as youth unemployment.
In the publication, Judith Rodin, President of The Rockefeller Foundation, suggests that the number of young people between the ages 15 and 24 in Africa will double from 200 million to 400 million by 2045. But only up to 5 million jobs will be created for the 10-12 million youth eligible to enter the formal economy annually. How to solve this?
Perhaps digital tools are able to provide insights and an understanding of the future of youth empowerment and employment. As digital tools become more efficient in solving daily productivity problems and more adaptive to learned situations, we’ll progress to a stage where digital tools can be deployed to solve some of society’s greatest challenges, including unemployment and/or employability.
Social networks have been doing this for advertising since their inception, leading to extremely successful business models. Can the same practices not be applied to civil society organizations, by designing digital tools that effectively address their unique requirements?
As an example of what is being already done, HuffPost names Coca Cola’s program called 5by20. 5by20 is The Coca-Cola Company’s global commitment to enable the economic empowerment of 5 million women entrepreneurs across the company’s value chain by 2020.
Another overlooked solution is placing youth with local civil society organizations, many of which seek support by means of volunteerism. This is arguably one of the most impactful ways to build social cohesiveness. To this effect, it has been proven in the US and in the UK that ‘volunteerism’ is able to increase a young person’s employability by up to 40%.
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