School dropout, unemployment and stagnation: the challenges facing young people
School dropout and unemployment are among the greatest challenges that Europe, and Italy in particular, must address when it comes to younger generations. In 2020, according to ISTAT, 543,000 young people in Italy aged between 18 and 24 left education after completing lower secondary school.
This is a significant figure, especially considering that Italy ranks below the European average, where the average early school-leaving rate is 9.9%, compared with 13.1% in Italy, and that 25.3% of young people are unemployed in Italy.
In light of these figures, how will these young people be able to inhabit and lead the world of the future with enthusiasm, courage and perseverance? The risk is that this situation turns into stagnation.
Our country in fact holds the unfortunate European record for the number of NEETs: young people aged between 15 and 34 who are not in employment, education or training.
Giving young people a clear role in the world, recognising their position and offering them the opportunity to enter and remain in the labour market, while helping them understand the wide range of possibilities available to them, is one of the main challenges for the coming years.
The potential of youth: values that are more or less visible
After two years of pandemic, rethinking the role of young people at the centre of European and national policies is a priority. Young students and workers, more than anyone else, now feel the need to start again.
This desire does not benefit only individual wellbeing, but also the regeneration of the territories and communities to which these young people belong.
The evidence showing that younger generations are more sensitive and attentive to environmental issues is now well established.
According to 69% of Generation Z, sustainability is an important goal; 71% of Millennials believe reducing their ecological footprint is essential; and according to research conducted by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, between 65% and 90% describe themselves as “concerned” or “very concerned” about the environment.
In recent years, young people have increasingly become protagonists of change.
From Malala Yousafzai, the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate for her commitment to civil rights and women’s right to education, to Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist for sustainable development and against climate change; from Fridays for Future demonstrations filling Italian squares to youth delegations participating in major international events such as the climate COP.
However, this new awareness among young people must also be accompanied by new tools.
We have an invaluable resource in our hands: the openness, imagination and freshness of young minds which, naturally inclined toward the concept of impermanence, embody flexibility and adaptability — two essential qualities for overcoming today’s challenges.
And yet, the current education system is still too often trapped in excessively rigid, vertical, theoretical, sectoral and hypercompetitive models and methods.
Even in terms of skills, many universities still struggle to adequately prepare students with the real competencies required by the labour market. The alarming figures relating to the “brain drain” of thousands of Italian students after completing their studies reveal our current inability to offer young people fairly paid job opportunities, support their human and professional growth, and guarantee them a future free from precariousness.
School should be the first place where aware and responsible citizens are formed, prepared to face the challenges and complexities of our era, enabling them to develop critical thinking, dialogue, collaboration and an awareness of the power we exercise every day through our choices and decisions.
School should be the first, but not the only, place where a 360-degree culture of sustainability is spread, in all its complexity and entirety, as structured by the 2030 Agenda.
Young people are extraordinary drivers of social change. Activating seeds of sociability and solidarity within them is essential to ensuring the activation of entire communities.
A Europe for young people, with young people
One of the European Union’s main objectives, in line with those of the United Nations, is to work with young people to strengthen their role in the world, helping them understand their opportunities not only in relation to the transition toward a sustainable and green society, but above all in terms of their potential to ensure peace and security in the world of tomorrow.
In recent years, the EU has paid increasing attention to the vision, ideas and participation of younger generations in building a more inclusive, green and digital future.
The EU Youth Strategy provides the policy framework within which the potential of youth policies can be maximised between 2019 and 2027.
Engage, connect and empower: these are the three key words summarising the strategy, which consists of 11 targets addressing the cross-cutting challenges that young Europeans face every day.
These include gender equality, a green and sustainable Europe, youth development in rural areas and stronger connections between the EU and young people.
Within the framework of this strategy, the Union declared 2022 the European Year of Youth, with the aim of celebrating and encouraging younger generations to become active citizens and protagonists of positive change.
It is an opportunity to build a bridge of dialogue with Europe’s youngest citizens through the sharing of ideas and encouraging proposals aimed at younger generations, while also providing young people with the inspiration needed for change.
This strategy is beginning to take shape through concrete activities and actions.
Throughout the year, the Union has organised multiple discussion forums with young people to disseminate new solutions designed by young people, for young people.
It represents a different and innovative way of achieving European policy objectives by making the target groups themselves the protagonists of their design.
One example of this approach was the webinar organised by the EU last April entitled “Energy for the European Green Deal”, during which young Europeans aged 18 to 34 discussed ecological and sustainable transition and youth involvement.
NextGenerationEU, designed by the Commission as a European recovery plan focused above all on the needs of younger generations, is not simply a financial fund.
Its objective is to provide young people with the necessary tools — €809.6 billion in total investment and a long-term recovery plan — to make Europe greener, more digital, inclusive, healthier and stronger through active youth participation.
Objectives such as reducing the school dropout rate to 9% by 2030 or revitalising the European agrifood supply chain by relaunching agritech and making the sector more attractive to young people have therefore become part of the Union’s plans for the coming decades.
It is enough to consider that in 2016 only 11% of EU farmers were young people under the age of 40.
Seeds of the future: when young people become protagonists and co-authors of prosperity
Younger generations are the beating heart of a form of development that brings People and Planet together toward the regeneration of territories and communities.
For this reason, they need care, attention, skills and motivation.
For Future Food, change begins with education: cultivating the knowledge and curiosity of future generations is the only way to enable them to know, understand and rediscover the beauty and complexity of today’s world.
Through education, it is possible to spread once again values that are essential to humanity, such as cooperation, trust, reciprocity and respect.
Without these values, it would be impossible to pursue a process of co-design — necessary for solving today’s challenges — and to lay the foundations for conscious and sustainable forms of leadership.
Since its earliest years, the Future Food Institute has trained hundreds of Climate Shapers, mostly young people, through the various Boot Camps co-organised with FAO.
This represents a new way of conceiving education, starting from the value of food, the challenges of the entire food supply chain and the dense network of cross-cutting consequences that makes it possible to implement an integrated educational and behavioural approach involving both learners and educators, doers and thinkers.
This approach was recently recognised internationally for innovation, originality and creativity applied to the field of international education.
This commitment continues through the desire to create new foundations for schools, making them capable of providing tomorrow’s citizens with the right tools to live within today’s complexity.
The introduction in Italian schools of new practical and interactive learning methodologies, such as hackathons, pursues precisely this objective: giving young people a voice and power, making them aware, sensitive, courageous and genuine protagonists of change.
The Hackathon nelle scuole, organised in cooperation with Cosmopolites, is only the most recent example.
Moving toward genuine youth empowerment is a mission pursued every day by the Future Food Institute, including directly within its Living Lab in Pollica, a small village in Campania: one of the Italian regions most affected by high school dropout rates, reaching 17.3% in 2020 alone.
Preventing the abandonment of villages — which in Italy means addressing 5,383 small towns at risk, including 2,381 municipalities already in an advanced state of abandonment and the remainder already completely depopulated — is still possible.
To do so, we chose to start again from their roots: the land, food and young people.
“Agri-culture Youth Welfare”, the entrepreneurship school created to relaunch youth entrepreneurial skills in Pollica, and the Rareche Academy, a training program designed to introduce young NEETs to the world of regenerative agriculture for the first time, providing skills and creating regenerative business models to repopulate and regenerate rural areas and communities, are just two examples of how youth potential can be relaunched in Pollica.
But young people also need new spaces for gathering and culture.
Involving future generations in imagining, designing and building the territory itself is an effective way to encourage them to stay and develop their potential in a familiar place.
The challenge organised last April by Future Food for the construction of Pollica’s new play centre is an example of how young people and children stepped into the role of designers for the regeneration of the territory.
Starting from a simple place such as a play centre, the design challenge became for these children and young people the seed of a change capable of allowing not only the individuals involved in the event to flourish, but the entire community.
These are the seeds of the future that should be planted more often, capable of generating collective and shared prosperity.
During Agrifood Week, young people will once again take centre stage in a design challenge as part of the hackathon “The One Health Hack – Agriculture, Food, Sport, And Tourism In The Mediterranean Diet Framework”.
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