The European Commission has recently released the new Youth Guarantee report, highlighting concrete practices to improve the outreach to young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs). The report is aimed at drawing out lessons learned and challenges starting from the first five years of implementation of the EC Youth Guarantee programme.
The report – titled “Effective outreach to NEETs: Experience from the ground” -identifies three main key success factors:
- having a strategic approach and flexibility in implementation;
- taking a preventative approach and thus early intervention;
- tailoring strategies and services to young people’s needs.
The Youth Guarantee is a commitment by all Member States to ensure that all young people under the age of 25 years receive a good quality offer of employment, continued education, apprenticeship and traineeship within a period of four months of becoming unemployed or leaving formal education, proving to be a well-established tool to fight youth unemployment in Europe.
Despite the good results of the framework, many Member States still struggle to reach out to all young people needing support: currently, fewer than 40% of NEETs in the EU are registered with their national Youth Guarantee provider. In particular, young people with disadvantaged backgrounds, such as migrants, young people with disabilities, or those with caring responsibilities, are underrepresented among Youth Guarantee beneficiaries.
Additionally, from 2016 to 2018 the Commission financed nine projects on information sharing and outreach activities to young people about Youth Guarantee offers. The projects have led to nation-wide outreach campaigns, outreach events as well as websites and mobile applications to register for the Youth Guarantee online.
Eurodiaconia is also active on training opportunities for young people: over the last one year and a half, our network has led an Erasmus+ project – “Empower You(the)!” – focused on sharing innovative youth methods and models implemented by six members of our network. An Online Toolkit containing the project’s most innovative findings was published as the main outcome and was also included in the SALTO-YOUTH Toolbox, a collection of European youth work materials selected by a network of six Resource Centres working under the Erasmus+ programme.
To know more about the new Youth Guarantee report, read the European Commission news.