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Rural Poverty Report 2011
sometimes, hazardous jobs. This vulnerability is greater in situations where large
cohorts of young people are entering the labour market, when they have left school
early and when social institutions discriminate against girls working. 65 The rural nonfarm
economy is often a major source of employment for youth, and young people
are also more likely than older people to migrate to urban areas, where they may not
compete well with urban residents because they have lower education levels. Failure
to secure employment or to move beyond low-skilled, informal jobs feeds into other
disadvantages affecting poor youth, such as their continued inability to build an asset
base, access financial services, or enhance their skills and education.
The MDGs’ focus on children – primary education, gender equality in primary
education, infant and child mortality, and a range of relevant health services – has
ensured that substantial progress has been made in these areas. By contrast, the
international, and in many cases national, development communities have given
only limited attention to youth, despite the 2007 WDR’s focus on the ‘next generation’.
Most public policies and programmes addressing rural poverty do not mention youth;
and conversely, most reports on youth give only limited attention to the very specific
issues that rural youth face. As a consequence, there is a dearth of public policies that
can serve as a model to address the specific, mutually reinforcing disadvantages
affecting rural young men and women.
Indigenous peoples
Indigenous and tribal peoples and ethnic minorities constitute roughly 5 per cent of
the world’s population, but they are 15 per cent of the world’s poor. 66 In Latin
America, poverty rates for indigenous peoples are substantially higher than for nonindigenous:
in Paraguay, poverty is almost eight times higher among indigenous
peoples, in Panama almost six times higher and in Mexico three times higher. 67
As with rural women, poverty for indigenous peoples is rooted in multiple forms of
disadvantage and deprivation. Virtually everywhere, indigenous peoples suffer from
discrimination, violation of their rights (social, political, human and economic) and
exclusion (or self-exclusion) from mainstream social, economic and political
processes. For indigenous women and youth, there is typically an overlap of these
and other forms of deprivation specific to their gender or age groups.
In addition, indigenous peoples in many parts of the world suffer from precarious
control over their natural resource base, particularly in the face of commercial interests
in, for example, timber exploitation, food or biofuel production or mining on their
land. In Asia, for instance, where 70 per cent of the world’s indigenous peoples live,
their ancestral territories are often threatened by deforestation and takeover of
resources. In many countries, indigenous children and youth face discrimination in
access to education – notably in their own languages and based on their cultures –
and adults face discrimination in labour markets. The disadvantages faced by