Tackling Youth Unemployment in Costa Rica

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) almost 75 million people under the age of 25 are unemployed. Olman Segura Bonilla, the Minister of Labour in Costa Rica, believes that despite the fiscal and economic problems that many countries are facing, it is better to invest money now in improving the situation of today’s youth. 

“If we do not invest somehow in education and actions to link these young people to businesses, industries and jobs then sooner rather than later we will need to invest this money into addressing problems for drugs, vandalism or other problems,” he explained. 

In Costa Rica, there are four EUROsociAL projects working to reduce unemployment. They address different aspects from fiscal education to assisting with caring for children and elderly relatives to allow women to go out and work. 

Empleate (Get Employed) is one of these four projects. It targets young people aged 17 to 24 who are neither studying nor working. The aim is to bring them back to school by providing them with technical education. The project is linked to businesses and industries through an alliance between the government and the private sector to ensure that once the students have completed their education they can get jobs within these organisations. 

“This has been a very good project because those students who had previously abandoned their studies are now interested in coming back. At the same time it gives families opportunities to generate income,” said Mr Bonilla. He elaborated that although it has only been running for three years, already over 1000 students have graduated.

Empleate is an initiative of the Costa Rican government and boasts partners from Telefonica to Walmart. Due to the large scale of the project – there are thousands of students working around the country in different institutes – it is difficult for the government to monitor and remain in contact with all the students. Subsequently EUROsociAL has provided assistance in creating a technical platform to facilitate this. The German Society for International Cooperation, GIZ, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) also support the initiative, while the ILO have considered it a key replicable initiative that can be expanded to other countries. 

“Countries both in Latin America and Europe are facing the same problems,” said Mr Bonilla. “Here young people are facing big problems because they have no jobs, they have no salary, they have no income and at the same time they have lost opportunities for education. The experiences that we have been developing in Latin America may be good for Latin American countries, but also for Europe.”

Mr Bonilla concluded with praise for EUROsociAL. He believes that middle-income countries in Latin America have fallen into a ‘trap’. “We are not developed, we still have a lot of problems that we need to face: we have fiscal deficits, we have income distribution problems and definitely we need help and action in key areas.” EUROsociAL has allowed these middle-income countries to receive this help that they not only “need to solve their problems but also to show their mistakes in order not to repeat them and their successes in order not to reproduce them.”