The State of Rural Youth
The Global Opportunity Youth Network, a multi-stakeholder initiative hosted at The Aspen Institute and managed in partnership with The Global Development Incubator, partnered with Transform Rural India and Development Intelligence Unit to amplify the voices of 5,169 rural opportunity youth from 21 states, capturing their aspirations, challenges, and needs.
Authored by Annu Mehta, the report is full of actionable insights to unlock the potential of rural youth and drive economic growth.
Youth employment is a global challenge. Of the 1.8 billion youth worldwide, a third are out of school, unemployed or working in informal jobs. 90 percent live in developing economies, and three in four are women. In the face of growing unemployment, youth are grappling with the changing nature of work, automation, digitization, etc., alongside population shifts, health crises, climate change, conflict, etc.
India has ~378 million young people. Two out of three live in rural areas, and are largely disconnected from India’s story of economic growth, with women and youth disproportionately affected. Rural India makes up 70 percent of the country’s population, but only contributes about 46 percent towards the country’s GDP, with ~80 percent employed in agriculture and allied activities.
India’s rural youth have the potential to be the drivers of our economy. But how do we unlock this potential? The first step is to listen to young people – and this report captures the voices of rural youth from across the country, their aspirations and challenges, and desired services and areas of support – segmented by gender, age, and employment status, with the objective to yield actionable insights for stakeholders within the rural youth employment ecosystem.