Globally, unemployment is hitting young people the hardest. The ILO estimates that youth unemployment rates are 300 percent higher than unemployment rates for adults over 25 years old, and higher than unemployment among any other age group. To add to this, many youth are also not enrolled in education or training.

But young people are not standing by and waiting for opportunities to come their way. Many of them are actively engaged in tackling the challenge—not just for themselves but for youth in their communities too.

We interviewed three youth leaders from the Solutions for Youth Employment Youth Advisory Group who are tackling youth unemployment challenges in their own countries:

• Federico Silva, a Mozambican social entrepreneur, develops technical solutions for social and economic development. He started an online job portal to connect informal workers to the market;
• Anna Bethune co-founded a non-profit that offers civic coding bootcamps to high school girls in Chicago and Jamaica; and
• Gulcan Yayla is the Co-Founder of Kodluyoruz (We Code) a social enterprise working to make Turkey a worldwide talent hub for the technology sector while addressing the youth unemployment and underemployment problems.

Listen to the interview to find out more about these motivated youth and their work to address youth unemployment!