Adolescence

complement formal schooling that teaches young peoplereading, writing and arithmetic skills while teachingthem about their rights and giving them practical skillsto improve their employment prospects. In El Salvador,the Ministry of Education and Labour, non-governmentalorganizations and GTZ targeted young rural women inparticular to offer the skills, personal development andvocational and other training needed to promote employment.Among the national strategies adopted elsewherehave been youth entrepreneurship and leadership training,microcredit schemes, the establishment of new careersguidance services and the promotion of information andcommunication technology (ICT) skills. 10Despite the current economic storm clouds, there is nobetter time than the present to invest in developing theskills of adolescents and job opportunities for young people.The slowing of fertility rates worldwide represents ademographic opportunity for many developing countries.A large number of developing countries, particularly lowincomenations, are approaching a period – long past inthe industrialized countries and even some middle-incomecountries – when lower birth rates combine with highernumbers of adolescents and youth than ever before tomake the productive workforce an extremely large proportionof the total population. While the number ofdependents relative to the working population is falling,TECHNOLOGYDigital safety for young people:Gathering information, creating new models and understanding existing effortsby Colin Maclay,Gerrit Beger, Urs Gasserand John PalfreyOne of the most profound changes in the pastdecade has been the widespread – although uneven– proliferation of information and communicationstechnologies.Social network sites, mobile phone operatorsand other private actors are implementing savvymethods designed to appeal to youth in developingcountries. The following events are particularlyinteresting:• Orkut, Google’s social network site, was votedMTV India’s Youth Icon of 2007.• In response to the overwhelming presence ofOrkut in India, Facebook made its social networksite available in Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam,Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu, to target Indian youthwho are not fluent in English.• Facebook has also been available in Swahili sincethe summer of 2009, targeting 110 million peoplein Africa.• Facebook Zero was launched in May 2010 as amobile site free of data charges and available in45 countries – 10 in Africa – where access to theInternet can be slow and costly.• Other sophisticated information and communicationtechnology innovations include Mxit, thenumber one social network site in South Africa;and Sembuse, in East Africa, the first mobilenetwork site to allow the cheap sending ofmessages up to 1,000 characters (compared toonly 160 for regular short text messaging).These developments are exciting and offer possibilitiesfor transforming learning, civic engagement,innovation, entrepreneurship and much more. Butthey also pose risks.A growing concern for parents, educators and othersinvolved with the welfare and well-being of childrenand adolescents is related to young people’s abilityto use these tools safety and effectively. In addition,the explosive growth of ICT also presents challengesto young people’s privacy, freedom of expressionand physical and psychological well-being – andthere remain fundamental knowledge gaps regardingtheir impact. Despite agreement that risks for youngpeople exist, these have largely gone both unexaminedand unaddressed in developing countries. At thesame time, a mixture of genuine concern, powerfulanecdote, traditional culture and diverse politicalforces is driving interventions in the name of childsafety and may lead to ineffective or even counterproductivepolicies.Effective problem solving begins with the definitionand exploration of the problem in question. Whileit may seem straightforward, a comprehensive anduniform concept of what safety means in the onlinecontext is lacking. In addition, the interpretation andrelative prevalence of risks varies. In developingnations, for instance, while some forms of aggressivebehaviour may be less common, certain sexualrisks – whether sex tourism, trafficking of childrenor production of child pornography – are likely to50THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S CHILDREN 2011