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In 2013, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) initiated a project on social inclusion of youth in contexts of increasing violence and insecurity, with a focus on Central America, one of the most violent regions in the world.
This project aimed to promote the effective social inclusion of youth by strengthening the capacity of governments (and specifically the entities charged with overseeing youth policies, in most cases National Youth Institutes) to assess and design more effective policies to confront youth exclusion and violence. The project also seeked to facilitate the use of data in the design, implementation, and monitoring of youth inclusion policies and programmes as well as identifying, analyzing, and disseminating successful youth social inclusion initiatives, particularly those pertaining to violence prevention. As part of this project ECLAC worked in close collaboration with regional actors, such as the UN Inter-Agency Working Group on Youth, the Secretariat for Central American Social Integration (SISCA), and the Iberoamerican Youth Organization (OIJ).
To achieve the project objectives, a number of activities were planned, including a book analyzing the situation of youth social inclusion in the region, an online youth observatory (http://dds.cepal.org/juvelac) which will serve as a one-stop online platform for those seeking information on youth social inclusion in the region, and a toolkit on designing policies to promote youth social inclusion. Training workshops at the national and regional levels were held in the use of this toolkit.
A closing international seminar will be held in San Salvador, El Salvador on October 13-14th, 2015. For more information regarding this event or the rest of the project’s production please contact daniela.trucco@cepal.org