Giving Compass' Take:

•  A training program called Youth Junction, part of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP), equips marginalized, rural Indian youth with skills training for urban jobs. 

• How do specialized training and placement support make a difference in program effectiveness and sustainability? 

• Learn more about the jobs crisis in India. 

Youth unemployment—particularly among rural youth—is a hot political issue in India, where more than 56 percent of secondary school students in India lack basic digital skills. The economy has been growing fast, but only about 30 percent of young adults can operate a computer—the figure is lower for women—and while more young people are studying beyond secondary school, many are still finishing with few marketable skills. Every year, while nearly eight million young people in India take short-term job skills training programs, those programs produce a job for only about one in three of them.

Because the demographics of development is shifting, with countries becoming more urban and rural communities depending more on remittances, some nonprofits are shifting their focus from addressing rural livelihoods to supporting urban transplants and their ties to home. For this reason, while “rural” is baked into the name of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP)—an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network—the agency has seen demand for new services, in India and elsewhere, where young people are moving to the cities for work. In addition to job skills, they look for support finding employment and the life skills around adapting to city life.

Apoorva Oza, the head of AKRSP in India, has worked with the agency since the 1980s, but he described how, on a commuter bus ride in 2006, he was struck by the tide of the young people among his fellow passengers, and their different needs:

“They would all be eager and enthusiastic, going with their folders and you could see they were applying for jobs [in cities like Vadodara, Ahmedabad, and Surat]. And the same kids you would meet in villages, the children of farmers we were working with, and they would be very disappointed.”

That exchange spurred the start of the training program, called Yuva Junction (“yuva” means “youth” in Hindi) which has provided computer and job skills—and life skills training—for more than 37,000 young people over the last 10 years.

Read the full article about training rural youth in India for jobs by David A. Taylor at Stanford Social Innovation Review.