Recursos

En 2030, los jóvenes representarán alrededor del 15 % de la población mundial, y la juventud rural alrededor del 6 %. En algunas regiones se espera que se produzca un aumento sin precedentes en la población de jóvenes.

This publication seeks to provide development practitioners, governmental and non-governmental organizations and agencies with insights into the case studies on overcoming the challenges that young people face in diverse contexts. 

The Latin America and the Caribbean region is a different place than it was 25 years ago. Today, every nation except Haiti is categorized as middle income. The region has reduced poverty by half, and the prevalence of hunger has declined by almost two thirds. More than half the adult population has attended secondary school.

Rural areas are changing too. They are no longer narrowly defined by their food production role, and key issues encompass many non-agricultural topics – including non-farm employment opportunities, especially for young people and women; migration and remittances; social protection; and the role of secondary cities. 

Although there have been improvements in YFS access, youth are still lagging significantly behind adults in being able to access financial tools. Across high- and low-income countries, young people are less likely than adults to have a formal account. There are even starker differences related to a country’s income level, with 21 per cent of youth in low-income economies having a formal account compared with 61 per cent in upper-middle-income economies (Demirguc-Kunt et al., 2013). 

Even with this data, determining the exact extent of youth access to financial services can be complicated because there is a lack of consistent data and definitions on youth (see Box 3). The lack of data is more limited for rural areas.
While there is some analysis of the urban-rural gap in access to financial services, with those living in cities significantly more likely to have an account than rural residents (Klapper, 2012), there are currently no comprehensive studies with disaggregated data for rural youth.

​IFAD’s mission is to invest in rural people, with the objective of overcoming poverty. Young people have increasingly become a priority target for IFAD as part of the agency’s fight against rural poverty (IFAD, 2014a).

El FIDA siempre ha adoptado un enfoque proactivo para la focalización en la población rural pobre de todas las edades, con el objetivo de reducir las desigualdades sociales y económicas que favorecen la aparición y la perpetuación de la pobreza.

Hasta hace relativamente poco tiempo, la atención prestada a las necesidades y vulnerabilidades específicas de los jóvenes1 era escasa, debido a que no se les consideraba partes interesadas por derecho propio, sino beneficiarios subalternos e indirectos, y por tanto invisibles.

Esta percepción ha cambiado de forma radical y los proyectos financiados por el FIDA cada vez incluyen más disposiciones explícitas para el desarrollo en favor de los jóvenes.