Thirteen years after the first and only comprehensive survey on youth and the youth sector in BiH was conducted, the first preliminary results of the latest survey on the position of youth in the country were presented Thursday showing that the desire to leave the country is still high, as more than 50 percent of youth say they want to leave BiH.

The official results of the research will be published on the Institute for Youth Development KULT website at the end of July this year.

Since 2008, when the first such research was conducted, the lives of young people have changed significantly. According to the 2013 census, there were 773,850 young people aged 15 to 30 living in BiH. In other words, 21.91 percent of the population are classified as youths.

„The research process was conducted with the application of the strictest methodological standards, in which consultations with the BiH Statistics Agency helped us a lot. The research will be publicly available and will benefit all interested parties, primarily the decision-makers in creating concrete measures aimed at improving the position of youth in our country,” said Seherzada Halimic, Executive Director of the Institute for Youth Development KULT.

The research covered more than 10 topic areas such as education, work, employment and youth entrepreneurship, social care, health care, safety, culture and sports, activism and leisure, and youth participation, volunteering, mobility and migration. A total of 3,132 respondents from all over BiH participated in the research, of which 51.8 percent were women and 48.1% were men, aged between 15 and 30 years.

“Young people think that the priorities of BiH authorities over the next 5 years should be employment and education, and then health care, security and migration management in the context of the departure of the population from our country. Preliminary results show that over 65 percent of them live with their parents/guardians and that there is still a high interest in leaving BiH,” said Aziz Djipa, Head of Monitoring, Evaluation and Research at the Institute for Youth Development KULT, who added: “taking into account the age of the respondents, other surveys, the existence of undeclared work and various methodologies used for labour market research, it is very difficult to determine the youth unemployment rate in BiH. However, youth unemployment is still estimated to be high in relation to the working population.”

The fact that 40 percent of youth included in this research stated that a member of their immediate family has left BiH in the last 7 years is worrying, and that departures most often take place in suburban areas. Also, the results show that more than 50 percent of respondents have an interest in leaving our country, while 12.1 percent of them have already taken concrete steps in this direction.

The research on the position of youth in BiH was conducted by the Institute for Youth Development KULT with the support of Sweeden through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the Swedish Embassy in BiH, and with the support of GIZ by the order of the Federal Ministry for International Cooperation and Development, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), through the project “Technical Vocational Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”