114 \ Global Youth Development Index and Report 2016 YDI category. Within the youth cohort, young females are significantly less likely to have these opportunities than their male peers. • The YDI results show that even for countries with high overall levels of youth development, all is not well. The ten highest-ranking countries in the YDI scored worse than the ten lowest-ranked countries in the scores for indicators on drug abuse YLL and mental disorder YLL. These findings suggest that countries with higher levels of youth development need to prioritise young people’s mental health and their vulnerability to drug abuse in policies and development planning. • A spectre that looms just as threateningly in developed countries as it does in the developing world is youth unemployment. Young people are at least twice as likely as adults to be unemployed. In many developed countries, the ratio of youthto-adult unemployment is even higher. Youth unemployment is one of only two indicators in the YDI to show a deterioration from 2010 to 2015. Millions of young people are entering the labour market every year, and will continue to do so for the next few decades. Yet job creation is slowing down everywhere, a challenge that is being compounded by the aftershocks of the global financial crisis, structural changes in the global economy, climate change and increasing geo-political instability. The fact that a majority of employed young people in developing countries are doing precarious or dangerous work in the informal sector should also be a cause for alarm. Without bold moves from policymakers, employers and young people, a large proportion of today’s youth will be denied a path to upward social mobility and sustainable livelihoods, despite being more educated and more qualified than their parents’ generation. • Youth development tends to be most sluggish in countries where young people constitute a large proportion of the population. Since young people between the ages of 15 and 29 currently make up approximately one-quarter of the total population in nearly all developing countries, this finding should give cause for concern to everyone. A large population of disaffected or frustrated young people could provide the spark for socio-economic alienation, turmoil and instability. Encouragingly, the YDI results also show that many countries such as Costa Rica, Malaysia, Brunei, Qatar, Colombia and Bahrain have achieved relatively high levels of youth development despite significantly large youth bulges in their population. Similarly, the impressive progress Sub-Saharan Africa has made in the past five years in many aspects of youth development and the remarkable improvements in youth development in Indonesia in the Education domain are also laudable. These examples demonstrate that high levels of empowerment, development and social inclusion are possible for large populations of young people if the right policies and programmes, as well as effective checks and balances, are in place. • Despite impressive improvement in civic participation and the environment in which youth political participation takes place, young people’s participation in formal politics is declining. Most young people are increasingly taking part in informal modes of participation such as digital activism, protests and volunteering. Recourse to street protests by significant numbers of young people underscores growing frustration and unmet aspirations among the young; they may have come to the conclusion that direct action is the only way in which they can trigger meaningful change. The youth-led protests and civil disobedience movements that have spread through many countries in recent years are also symptoms of the fact that young people suffer disproportionately from policy failures such as housing shortages, poor quality of education and anti-austerity measures. They may also highlight the importance of investing in mechanisms and institutions that encourage young people to get involved more with formal channels of participation and decision making. • Young people suffer disproportionately as victims of violent crime and conflict. The spike in violent extremism and ethno-religious conflict in recent years, and the proliferation of non-state actors who actively recruit young people as their foot soldiers, threaten to negate many of the hardwon gains the world has been able to achieve in different domains of youth development. • There is currently a paucity of data on the world’s young people, particularly data disaggregated by age or gender, to guide policymakers and facilitate the prioritisation of those sectors that require the greatest attention of the state. Unless more effort is made at national and international levels to gather and use more representative data on the many dimensions of youth development to