Youth and Adolescents Development
UNICEF has launched and rolled out a number of skills-development programmes for young people
Challenges
Given the demographic situation in Uzbekistan – children and youth make up 55% of the population – the Government of Uzbekistan consistently emphasizes education, development, support and employment of youth as the country’s main priorities. A large number of resources and efforts are directed towards developing the country’s human capital. However, the school-to-work transition remains to be rather challenging for most young people.
Equipping adolescents and youth with relevant skills for the jobs of the future, providing them with career guidance and first employment experience is one of the greatest challenge of today. In this context, UNICEF has launched and rolled out a number of skills-development programmes for young people with a focus on the most vulnerable, including youth from remote areas, girls, young people with disabilities, refugees, unemployed and the others. Moreover, UNICEF established platforms for youth engagement in decision-making process on matters such as their community development, climate change and other.
Skills Development
For the last four years over 1,8 million young people (over 13,243 boys and 14,683 girls) were equipped with social, socio-emotional, employability, entrepreneurship, digital and STEM skills through the following programmes:
Social innovation and social entrepreneurship programme UPSHIFT
UPSHIFT supports young people of 16-24 years old to enhance their social and entrepreneurship skills, and to develop and implement innovative solutions for social problems faced in their communities. Through open, friendly and supportive environment, and real-life experience the programme aims to support the most vulnerable adolescents including girls, those living in remote rural areas, young people with disabilities and those leaving the state care, youth not in education, employment or training (NEET).
Educational programme Skills4Girls
Skills4Girls helps girls from remote areas and girls with visual and hearing impairments to develop computer literacy, coding and other digital skills for employment, as well as employability skills.
Girls-targeted educational STEM program UniSat
UniSat helps girls to develop programming, engineering, data analysis skills, enhance their knowledge in the fields of space and climate science through the process of building and launching a nanosatellite into the stratosphere. Upon completion of the program, most of the girls continue their studies or career in the field of science and technology.
Chat-based digital platform FunDoo
FunDoo helps young people, including the most vulnerable, in an interactive approach and self-paced mode to obtain 21st century, green and employability skills to get ready for the future.
Participation
Jointly with the national partners, UNICEF established platforms and increased capacity of young people and decision-makers to ensure meaningful participation of adolescents and youth on matters affecting their life through the following initiatives:
Youth and Child Friendly Local Governance initiative
Initiative puts youth and child rights issues, including meaningful participation, in the center of local platforms and decision making. The key objective of this initiative is to model an approach for a local governance that can best serve the development needs of their communities by systematically addressing the needs of children and youth.
National network of Young Climate Champions
The network engages adolescents of 15-18 years old from all regions of Uzbekistan. Young Climate Champions lead awareness-raising on climate change among children and youth, mobilize community-based climate actions and lead climate advocacy at national and international levels in collaboration with the Government. In 2024-2025 academic year, Young Climate Champions mobilized over 17,000 of their peers for climate actions, amplified the voices of youth from Uzbekistan at the national and international political dialogues such as COP-29 in Baku.
The way forward
UNICEF launched a number of innovative programme to facilitate school-to-work transition and active citizenship of young people, with a focus on the most vulnerable. These programmes serve as a model for further scale up and mainstreaming through formal and non-formal education platforms and the establishment of pathways to labour market and active citizenship.