World Youth Skills Day: Understanding the Importance of a Skilled Population

The youth are the future of the country. They are going to shape the direction of our country for the decades to come. Therefore, our society should take utmost care to make sure that the next generation is not neglected.

To highlight the importance of the future generation, the United Nations declared the 15th of July as World Youth Skills Day in 2014. It is a day to focus on equipping young people with skills for employment, decent work and entrepreneurship, as well as for addressing global challenges and advancing sustainable development.

Making a better world for the youth requires us to change our traditional way of thinking. Underemployment and income inequality are a rising problem all over the world. We need to create resources for the young to get jobs and tax the rich so that the power balance stays maintained.

But we also need to make sure that all get the fruits of development and not only one single population. In the Origin of Family, Private Property & State, Friedrich Engels writes

“The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time.”

Women’s Liberation Child Help Foundation

So we need to break down the traditional notion of the nuclear family where the husband earns and the wife takes care of the home. On the surface, this seems harmless but a wife who doesn’t earn becomes dependent on the husband and when she becomes dependent she is prone to abuse.

To make women liberated, we must encourage the building of daycare centres. Daycare centres not only give women an opportunity to earn money but don’t affect the bond between mother and child as one might suspect.

We also need to make a safe space for people belonging to different sexual orientations and gender identities. The world is changing and our attitude needs to be changed as well. Tamil Nadu has already started by educating children about LGBTQ issues. We all need to take this example from this and teach our children about vulnerable communities.

Child Help Foundation has been supporting the youth to get skills in the village of Gulabigaon in Nashik, Maharashtra. Till now, 2,167 people from the village have been endowed with skills that will help them get jobs. We are training not only men but also women to get employment and business opportunities.

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