10 \ Global Youth Development Index and Report 2016 Department for International Development, the US Agency for International Development and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development all have youth strategies that inform their programming around the world. Most policies and frameworks for children and young people use a rights-based approach whose defining feature is an emphasis on citizens as ‘rights holders’ and the state as the ‘duty bearer’. In contrast to a needs-based approach, which sees development assistance primarily as a needs assessment exercise, a rights-based approach firmly identifies development as an obligation of the state towards its people, providing a stronger basis for citizens to hold their governments to account. For example, when the need for clean water becomes the right to clean water, it implies the state has a responsibility to provide clean water, and gives justification to citizens to demand it. The shift to a rights-based approach creates a powerful normative framework within which development action can take place, and makes the demands of the people for basic services from the state more persuasive in a moral, legal and political sense. A rights-based approach ideally shifts how development actors undertake business, with a focus on strengthening the capacity of duty-holders to respond to and be accountable for obligations in fulfilling human rights, as well as enabling and empowering citizens to claim their rights.41 The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is the exemplar of a rights-based approach, and is the most widely ratified international human rights instrument in history. It sets out political, civil, economic, social, health and cultural rights of children and young people, and marked a turning point in the way young people would be viewed and treated, being individuals with a distinct set of rights, and not simply passive objects of charity.42 Notably, the CRC only covers the rights of young people up to the age of 18. In other words, from the day young people turn 18, they are vulnerable to a whole range of risks as they no longer enjoy the protection afforded by the CRC. For instance, an 18-year-old without a family may be asked to leave a care centre to live on their own, or a young person in the care of the justice system could be transferred from an institution focused on education and rehabilitation to an adult prison, forcing an accelerated transition to adult life. This uncertainty has prompted some scholars and practitioners to demand a separate international instrument for the protection of the rights of young people.43 The 2014 Baku Commitment to Youth Policy, which is the most recent international document to lay out guiding principles for national youth policy making, also promotes a rights-based approach, for youth policies across the globe. The Commonwealth PAYE, which sets out a framework for the Commonwealth’s support to member states in the area of youth, is also grounded within a rights-based approach. As the foundational document for the Commonwealth Youth Programme (CYP), the PAYE is guided by the realities facing young people in the Commonwealth, and anchored in the belief that young people are: • a force for peace, democracy, equality and good governance • a catalyst for global consensus building • an essential resource for sustainable development and poverty eradication.44 1.5�� Introducing the Youth Development Index It is worth clarifying at the outset that measuring something as complex and multidimensional as human or youth development through any single indicator is impossible. Like human development, youth development is a concept that can be better understood via an aggregation of several indicators. Many international, regional and national institutions publish data on specific aspects related to various age groups, including the young. By putting all the pieces of the jigsaw together to build a wide-ranging index, it is possible to quantify youth development in a reasonable and comparable way. The YDI is a composite index of 18 indicators that collectively measure progress on youth development in 183 countries, including 49 of the 53 Commonwealth countries. It has five domains, measuring levels of education, health and wellbeing, employment and opportunity, political participation and civic participation among young people. The YDI is guided by the Commonwealth definition of youth as people between the ages of 15 and 29, while recognising that some countries and international institutions define youth differently. By compiling the available stock of global youth-related datasets into one comprehensive and harmonised measure, the YDI enables users to gain a better understanding of youth development in a single snapshot. Moreover, the research that has informed the index also enables users to identify the