Al­though T&T is re­port­ed to have full un­em­ploy­ment, that is not the case among the coun­try's young peo­ple. A study re­leased this week by the Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank shows that T&T's youth un­em­ploy­ment rate, while be­low the world av­er­age, is still a source of con­cern. The CDB re­port shows that among eight coun­tries in the re­gion the youth un­em­ploy­ment rate is 25 per cent–the high­est world­wide.

The re­port, pre­sent­ed ear­li­er this week at the 45th An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing of the CDB's Board of Gov­er­nors in St Kitts and Nevis, was guid­ed by the In­ter­na­tion­al Labour Or­gan­i­sa­tion's (ILO's) De­cent Work Agen­da and the UN's Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goals. Key el­e­ments of these glob­al agen­das rel­e­vant to re­gion are cre­at­ing jobs; so­cial pro­tec­tion; skills for em­ploy­ment and en­tre­pre­neur­ship; and pro­mo­tion of ac­tive par­tic­i­pa­tion in the labour mar­ket.

The de­f­i­n­i­tion of youth adopt­ed for the study is 15-24 years of age, al­though the im­pact of un­em­ploy­ment on those up to age 29 was al­so analysed. Da­ta ob­tained by the T&T Guardian from the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO) shows that in the 15- 19 age group, the un­em­ploy­ment rate for the third quar­ter of 2014 was 19 per cent, while in the 20- 24 age group the rate was 6.8 per­cent.

Chief among CDB's find­ings is that there are gen­der dif­fer­ences in youth em­ploy­ment with fe­male youth un­em­ploy­ment stand­ing at rates over 30 per cent as against 20 per cent for young males. The coun­tries with the high­est per­sis­tent youth un­em­ploy­ment are Guyana and Suri­nam. Their rates have con­sis­tent­ly been above 30 per cent, with the rate in Guyana hov­er­ing around 40 per cent.

Ac­cord­ing to the CDB, un­em­ploy­ment in the eight Caribbean coun­tries stud­ied costs gov­ern­ments US$900 mil­lion in 2013 alone. The study finds that de­spite the ex­is­tence of sev­er­al core com­po­nents for ad­dress­ing youth un­em­ploy­ment across the Re­gion, the over­all sys­tem is frag­ment­ed and dis­joint­ed. While there is recog­ni­tion of the link­ages be­tween youth and youth-at-risk is­sues and un­em­ploy­ment, youth have be­come the re­mit of min­istries con­cerned sole­ly with so­cial is­sues or those re­lat­ed to sports and cul­ture, and some­times ed­u­ca­tion.