Putting Young People Into National Poverty Reduction Strategies

Many national poverty reduction strategies overlook the needs of young people. Even where national strategies do have a youth focus, the analysis of their situation is limitedbecause little or no reference is made to readily available data. For those advocating on behalf of young people in poverty, considerable scope exists to make use of simple but reputable statistics to mount a strong case for Governments and civil society to allocate more resources for addressing poverty among this major population group.

The purpose of this step-by-step guide is to show how relevant statistics on young people in poverty can be easily sourced for use in developing national poverty reduction strategies. The guide shows how to use accessible databases on the Internet to provide individual countries with sophisticated statistical profile of young people in poverty.

The available data can provide a profile at three levels of young people in poverty. At the broadest level, it is possible to show how significant young people, defined as a specific age group, are in a country's basic demographic structure now and in the future. The second level focuses in on the incidence of young people in poverty, using, for example, national averages based on Millennium Development Goals indicators. A third level of data offers a more differentiated picture of young people in poverty. This involves presenting detailed data, taking into account young people's differences by gender, rural/urban location, where the data is available, household poverty status.