Sustainability and networking as means of Asian youth empowerment and inclusion

Finding a job in South Asian countries is a major challenge for many young people and they abound in vulnerable employment where jobs are characterized by insecurity, low wages, poor working conditions and lack of social protection. (UN ESCAP 2015). To address these challenges, better policies targeting youth need to be developed and implemented, but Governments across the Asia-Pacific region have yet to formulate comprehensive national youth policies (UN Factsheets 2016). For this reason, fostering youth all-around-skills and ensuring their full participation, both in solving global challenges and local ones, is critical to the development and prosperity of the region.In addition, impaired access to education and formal jobs causes the youth to be either absorbed in precarious occupations within a bulging informal economy or to slide into criminality, or illegal activities. NGOs engaged at the grassroots level provide an invaluable support to the social inclusion and development of the youth, also by means of supporting them at the motivational level to stay within the formal education circuit, thereby acting as a fortification against youth unemployment and exclusion.To ensure timely support to youth social inclusion it is necessary to invest also in a private sector support, the civil society (the local community as a whole) and in young women and men. The aim of the cooperation is to increase South Asian youth workers’ ability to organize sustainable local networks able to foster youth participation in solving common challenges at the community level. SUSTAIN builds on a solid partnership between 7 organizations in possession of a good experience in youth activities and youth empowerment, all devoted to initiating and maintaining collaboration for active social inclusion and participation. SUSTAIN deploys interventions impacting directly both youth workers and young people in the local communities connected to the partners. The consortium will create specific learning materials aiming YOUTH WORKERS AND TRAINERS and a guideline useful or Asian NGOs active in supporting youth. The serve method will help NGOs in 2 ways: *Increase their ability to plan and deploy better activities targeting disadvantaged youth, together with more sophisticated skills in using non-formal education techniques better suited for *Foster their capacity to network with local actors to create better conditions within the community those disadvantaged youth reside. The cooperation will achieve a direct impact on young people through building the capacities of non formal learning to provide them with soft and transversal skills of personal fulfilment (leadership, flexibility, entrepreneurial sense, relational skills and skills of communication), and attitudes of active participation supporting their continued involvement in education and in the life of the community.