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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 9:14 pm
Time: 9:14 pm
Results for at-risk youth (latin america)
1 results foundAuthor: Cunningham, Wendy Title: Youth at Risk in Latin America and the Caribbean: Understanding the Causes, Realizing the Potential Summary: Realizing the potential of Latin America and the Caribbean’s youth is essential not only to their well-being, but also to the long-term welfare of the whole region.Young people’s families, communities, and governments— as well as private, nonprofit, and international organizations—have a responsibility to help youth reach their potential. There have been many successes but also important failures. How to build on the successes and correct the failures is the subject of this report. Young people are generally perceived as the source of many problems plaguing the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region today. Crime, violence, and illegal drugs are permeating the region. Youth unemployment rates are reaching new highs, and girls are giving birth at younger and younger ages, putting enormous financial and psychological costs on young people and on their societies. Recent initiatives by young people in the region have shown how the youth of LAC can be productive and contributing members of society. But governments, often more concerned about those who are not successfully navigating the youth years, repeatedly ask for advice from international experts about how best to support them. This book has two objectives: to identify the at-risk youth in LAC, and to provide evidence-based guidance to policy makers in LAC countries that will help them to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their youth investments. The book concludes that governments can be more effective in preventing young people from engaging in risky behavior in the first place and also in assisting those who already are engaged in negative behavior. To support governments in this endeavor, the book provides a set of tools to inform and guide policy makers as they reform and implement programs for at-risk youth. Many recent studies have analyzed the problems of young people in LAC and made policy recommendations. This book contributes to the debate in six ways that are intended to deepen our conceptual thinking about youth, to present new tools that will allow for a more accurate analysis of the youth population, and to extend the boundaries of policy options and reforms. The book does the following: 1. Focuses on young people who can be considered to be at risk. This subgroup is defined as young people who have factors in their lives that lead them to engage in behaviors or experience events that are harmful to themselves and their societies, and that affect not just the risk taker, but society in general and future generations. These behaviors include leaving school early without learning, being jobless (neither in school nor working), engaging in substance abuse, behaving violently, initiating sex at a young age, and engaging in unsafe sexual practices. 2. Considers the young person in his or her entirety rather than analyzing and proposing policies specifically for, say, the young unemployed, young mothers, or juvenile delinquents. This required the use of data sets that contained information about the many facets of a young person’s life and the use of analytical tools that allowed us to view many different dimensions of a young person’s life simultaneously. 3. Considers the many actors who shape the young person’s environment during his or her youth. This allowed us to make policy recommendations for a wider range of actors than studies that focus only on the young person. 4. Highlights the common factors that underlie most kinds of risky behavior and argues that a small set of broad, well-chosen policies can have a bigger impact than a sector-based portfolio. 5. Develops a new methodology to estimate the cost of risky behavior— to the individual and to society—across Latin America that will yield more accurate information for decision making at the individual and government levels. 6. Narrows the thousands of youth programs in the world to 7 “must have” initiatives, 9 “should have” initiatives, and 7 “general” programs and policies that are the most relevant for at-risk youth in LAC. These 23 programs and policies are the result of intensive consultation with policy makers, practitioners, and academics to identify the most appropriate policies and programs to support at-risk youth in LAC. Details: Washington, DC: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank, 2008. 326p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed July 17, 2013 at: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTLACREGTOPLABSOCPRO/Resources/YouthatriskinLAC.pdf Year: 2008 Country: Central America URL: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTLACREGTOPLABSOCPRO/Resources/YouthatriskinLAC.pdf Shelf Number: 116645 Keywords: At-Risk Youth (Latin America)Delinquency PreventionJuvenile Offenders |