1UN “Second country cooperation framework for BiH 2001-2003” Executive Board of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Population Fund, First Regular Session 2001, 29 Jan-6 Feb 2001, New York, Item 3 of the provisional agenda. 2 UN OIA Report, April 2005.
§ There is growing youth unemployment, disaffection and emigration. 1 Rather than improving, the situation is actually getting worse. Between 45% and 60% of youth are unemployed.2
§ 77% of youth (who form 25% of the population) want to leave Bosnia and Herzegovina, 24% of which want to leave forever without return, having no hope for their futures.2 They look to the “capitalist and successful “ West for solutions to their problems. “This haemorrhage of the young and talented poses perhaps the greatest long-term threat to this country”, Lord Paddy Ashdown warned when he was High Representative.3
§ 80% of young people are dissatisfied with the educational system.2 Education is still disrupted for most children, and the school curriculum varies according to the ethnic majority. Most schools operate a shift system, with two or three shifts a day.
§ A UNICEF report (1995) stated that the “children of East Mostar are the most severely traumatised of any in the former Yugoslavia” – these children are now teenagers – in the very age group that we work with at Klub Novi Most, Mostar.
Young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina are like young people everywhere except that their country is still recovering from war. Many still feel the trauma of what they experienced as children.
As well as the direct effects of being in a war, there are many day-to-day problems of growing up in a country where just about everything was destroyed or disrupted. Schools are still badly affected and jobs are hard to get.
Since the 1992-1995 war ended, the situation for young people in the nation has deteriorated, rather than improved. Of course there are many gifted and talented young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but those who are able to leave, tend to do so. We believe it is better for the nation if they stay, and carve a better future.
