Latin America’s time bomb: the “ninis”

(Photo: Rodrigo Abd – AP)

There was a lot of despair in Latin America about a new International Monetary Fund forecast showing that the region’s economy will shrink by 0.3 percent in 2016, but that’s something that could be reversed relatively soon. What’s much more alarming is a separate report that drew little attention, about the Latin American youths who don’t have a future.

The number of youths who neither work nor study — better known as “ninis” in the region — grew to 20 million during the past decade, according to a new World Bank study released this week. The growing numbers of “ninis” threaten to bring about greater inequality, poverty and crime rates in the near future, it says.

Among the conclusions of the World Bank’s report, entitled “Ninis in Latin America”:

▪ One in five youths aged between 15 and 24 in the region neither work nor study. The absolute number of “ninis” grew by 2 million to nearly 20 million during the past decade, despite the region’s booming economies in the early 2000s.

▪ Latin America’s “ninis” amount to about 20 percent of the region’s total number of youths. This is nearly twice the 11 percent of youths who neither work nor study in industrialized countries, although less than the percentage in the Middle East and Africa.

▪ Within Latin America, Honduras and El Salvador have the highest percentage of “ninis, ” about 25 percent of their young populations, while Peru’s percentage of “ninis” is 11 percent of its young. In absolute numbers, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have the largest numbers of “ninis.”

▪ Throughout Latin America, about two-thirds of all youths who neither work nor study are girls, many of whom abandon school because of pregnancies. But the fastest rising group within the “nini” population is that of young men, many of whom end up recruited by gangs or organized crime.

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