June 2005

How to Succeed at “Growing Up Global”

“In ten years, the roughly 1.5 billion young people in developing countries who are currently making the transition to adulthood will be between 20 and 34 years old,” says Population Council director of social science research Cynthia B. Lloyd. “They will have become young parents, citizens, and workers. Their futures and the futures of the communities and the countries where they live—indeed, of our global society—rest on the choices today’s adolescents make, or others make on their behalf.”

Recognizing the need for better understanding of the changes taking place in transitions to adulthood in the developing world, the National Research Council asked Lloyd, a leading authority on schooling and transitions to adulthood, to chair a panel charged with evaluating these trends. The 15 experts who scrutinized and distilled existing research for over three years included two other Council social scientists, Barbara Mensch and Shireen Jejeebhoy. Of the many contributors to the panel’s work, ten were from the Council: Mensch wrote the chapter on marriage; other staff members analyzed data, drafted chapters, and wrote background papers, some of which will be included in a second volume of commissioned papers.

Growing Up Global: The Changing Transitions to Adulthood in Developing Countries, edited by Lloyd, was published in May 2005. The encyclopedic, 700-page volume offers findings and recommendations about schooling, health, work, citizenship, marriage, and parenthood. It provides a framework for the development of effective policies and programs to prepare young people for five key adult roles: worker, citizen and community participant, spouse, parent, and household manager.

The panel reports that young people in the developing world are, on average, more likely to attend school than did their counterparts 20 years ago, to postpone entering the labor force (lowering child labor rates), and to delay marriage and childbearing. Another important finding is that, in a vast majority of countries, girls ages 15 to 17 who stay in school are less likely to report having had sex and are more likely to use contraception if they do than their out-of-school peers. Thus, the book reports, “policies that support universal primary schooling of adequate quality, that support the expansion of good secondary schooling, and that promote good health…are essential in their own right but also important because of their role in promoting success in…other domains.”

Extended years of schooling are giving young people in the developing world, on average, greater opportunity to prepare to participate effectively in decisions about their futures. However, the positive effects of economic growth in Asia—home to 70 percent of the developing world’s youth—skew global averages, and, even within regions, circumstances vary enormously. Roughly 325 million young people in developing countries live on less than one dollar per day. In the panel’s judgment, “poverty is the greatest enemy of successful transitions.”

The lives of today’s young people differ profoundly from those of their parents, or even of the youth of a decade ago. Ongoing changes in technology, business, culture, politics, the environment, and education impact virtually everyone, but young people in particular. The passage from childhood to adulthood is itself a period of momentous social, psychological, and biological transition. To come of age in a world in which global forces are reaching across national boundaries and into the smallest of rural communities is to be extraordinarily challenged.

“Their parents’ past experience will provide little guidance to these children with respect to their future life prospects,” Lloyd says. “In the panel’s view, it is extremely unlikely that the consequences of failure to invest in educating young people in these early stages of the life cycle can ever be compensated for at any later stage. It’s in everyone’s interests to act now.”

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