High unemployment and a lack of opportunities for young people can be a massive drag on economies, but it’s also one of the biggest recruitment drivers for extremist and terrorist groups, a new report has found.
Even before COVID-19, global youth had it harder than anyone else when it came to finding a job, with as many as 20% of 15- to 24-year-olds in an average developing country being neither employed nor in school in 2019, according to the IMF. In 2015, the World Bank forecast that while 1 billion young people would enter the labor market in the next decade, fewer than half would be successful.
