Addressing Unemployment with Social Innovation
Below you can see two shocking statistics about (un)employment, as well as youth.
The world needs to create more than 500 million new jobs by 2020 to provide career opportunities for the currently unemployed; as well as young people who will be joining the workforce.
Young and jobless in numbers: 75 million or 12.6% of young people are unemployed worldwide; 3x more likely to be jobless; 7.5 million are not in education or training; Youth unemployment is highest in North Africa (27.9%) and lowest in East Asia (9%).
Source: ILO 2012
This means that a lot of action and commitment is needed to address this ticking time bomb.
At the same time, there are many social issues that need to be tackled and where social innovation is a must.
Social Innovation areas:
- Poverty
- Food
- Water
- Sanitation
- Climate change
- Energy
- Healthcare
- Education
- Transport
- Cities
So, on one side there are young people looking for work and on the other side there are many issues, which need a lot of work.
Therefore, I have this ‘simple’ idea: To enable young people to work on these social innovation areas!
What is needed is that big companies as well as governments support this activity by means of investments, knowledge transfer, collaboration and mentoring.
I am convinced that Creative Generalists are needed to act as the catalyst for all these activities. With their broad perspectives and experiences, they are an excellent fit to connect all the stakeholders.
What do you think that is needed to get this initiative off the ground?
*Inspiring New Ways of Living and Working* | Service Innovation Synthesizer | ProPer Coach | Creative Generalist | Impact Innovator | Amersfoort, The Netherlands
2 responses to “Addressing Unemployment with Social Innovation”
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In many areas we have now systems that are collapsing because of their complexity and their dependency on other overly complex systems. A fantastic (social) innovative challenge for the young generation will be to invent, develop and implement changes or alternatives that make those systems more stable, less complex, less dependent, more local, more efficient etc. A lot of those young folks that struggle to find employment are very bright, well educated and energetic. If we can achieve to steer their creative energy (boosted by their frustrations) in that direction and at the same time provide them with a purpose and an income, our future can be much better faster.
The Social Innovation Areas require the application of a certain set of capabilities (knowledge, skills, experience, attitudes, behavior) across multiple cultures in order to affect resolution.
While I agree with “…big companies as well as governments support this activity by means of investments, knowledge transfer, collaboration and mentoring,” time is of the essence. There is a big bomb out there and I contend the fuse has been lit.
The first step seems to be identifying which of these areas, if resolved, can have the highest positive impact. I think these are the set of basic needs (physiological per Maslow). This implies that we need to also do something about the approach to development used in the world (Easterly, Sachs, something else).
This suggests the early adoption of a regime to manage this whole process which, of course, would take us into the seemingly bottomless pit of geopolitics.
Daunting, this, but we need, borrowing from Roosevelt, to be the man in the arena.
In many areas we have now systems that are collapsing because of their complexity and their dependency on other overly complex systems. A fantastic (social) innovative challenge for the young generation will be to invent, develop and implement changes or alternatives that make those systems more stable, less complex, less dependent, more local, more efficient etc. A lot of those young folks that struggle to find employment are very bright, well educated and energetic. If we can achieve to steer their creative energy (boosted by their frustrations) in that direction and at the same time provide them with a purpose and an income, our future can be much better faster.
The Social Innovation Areas require the application of a certain set of capabilities (knowledge, skills, experience, attitudes, behavior) across multiple cultures in order to affect resolution.
While I agree with “…big companies as well as governments support this activity by means of investments, knowledge transfer, collaboration and mentoring,” time is of the essence. There is a big bomb out there and I contend the fuse has been lit.
The first step seems to be identifying which of these areas, if resolved, can have the highest positive impact. I think these are the set of basic needs (physiological per Maslow). This implies that we need to also do something about the approach to development used in the world (Easterly, Sachs, something else).
This suggests the early adoption of a regime to manage this whole process which, of course, would take us into the seemingly bottomless pit of geopolitics.
Daunting, this, but we need, borrowing from Roosevelt, to be the man in the arena.