Ten years ago, I was working at a Non-Governmental Organization in The Azores Islands, a Portuguese archipelago right in the middle of the Atlantic, a place where, by the way, I still live. Young people at that time were struggling. In 2012, Portugal was reaching the peak of the 2008 economic crisis, meaning that younger generations were either unemployed or forced to leave the country to find a job and a future. In most of the rural and outermost regions of the country such as The Azores, the impact of the crisis was even stronger. Local economies in these areas often depend on one main economic sector, usually farming, public employment, and sectors requiring low-qualified jobs. None of these options is usually available for challenged youths, especially those who are underqualified. Farming is mostly a family business, passed on from one generation to another. The public sector is a huge employer, but the opportunities are very limited for less experienced workers and were shrinking due to the cuts on State hiring procedures, at that time. Even low-qualified jobs were not available then, as some activities such as construction were particularly exposed to the economic downturn.
During this period, from 2012 to 2014, I was doing a bit of everything, from street work and out-reach, to activation, networking with schools and public employment services or project management, including some projects funded by the EEA & Norway Grants through a national instrument called Cidadãos Ativos (Active Citizens). I mostly met NEETs in my ongoing work. Dealing with them, I always felt that they faced very specific challenges. They lived in communities far away from big urban centers, had struggled in school, leading them to perpetuate negative perceptions about public services in general, and saw no real opportunities to find a decent job in the years to come. I started to listen to their stories differently after our organization kicked off a project to promote youth employment for NEETs in farming. Early in the morning, I would go out to the fields with small groups of those participating in the project. While we prepared altogether whatever we had to do (planting, watering, cropping) they shared their most personal views about what they were experiencing as NEETs. Some were young mothers, others had disabilities, and others just did not trust themselves anymore. The project ended up being a success for most of them. Many of the participants managed to find a job in farming or related areas such as food packaging. For me, that experience was a breakthrough as a person and later, as a researcher. Still, it took me a while to understand it, maybe as all complex things do.
It was only in 2017 that I started to understand that rural NEETs were simply ignored by research and policy. That puzzled me, especially when I started to look at the numbers. Indeed, rural NEETs shares were and continue to be much higher compared to NEET shares in urban and suburban areas, across the EU, especially in Southern and Eastern parts of the continent. In countries such as Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, or Romania, these differences reach ten or even twenty percentual points. Later on, my curiosity led me to conduct a bibliometric review to check how exactly rural NEETs were in the spotlight of researchers. From 262 papers published between 2002 and 2020 on NEETs, only 14 reported partially or entirely on rural NEETs.
From these initial efforts to understand the living conditions and the profile of rural NEETs until now, much has happened, especially in the past five years. From the research point of view, a considerable number of papers and even special issues have started to flood databases, especially since 2021, adding important layers to what we know about this subgroup. Very disparate issues such as case studies on rural NEETs’ inclusion in farming, their psychosocial profile, outreach strategies dedicated to them, or public policy analysis aiming at this and other vulnerable rural youth groups have been published. Moreover, these recent publication trends have been streamed into or led to systematic research efforts through funded initiatives such as the Track-IN project, funded by the Youth Employment Fund of the EEA & Norway Grants.
From the policy side, the sense that rural NEETs are finally under the radar is becoming clear. Several policy packages, including broadband ones such as the EU Green Deal, have put vulnerable rural youths’ futures in the spotlight. Moreover, the new EU Youth Strategy has declared moving rural youth forward as one of its priorities.
Still, important issues remain unsolved, especially from the public services deliverance perspective. How can these services be better tailored at the regional level to fulfill the broadband policies vision such as the one proposed by the New Youth Guarantee? How can rural public services better combine the communities’ resources and opportunities with rural NEETs’ expectations? Moreover, how can institutions work to improve young citizens’ trust in their support? And how should this be done in a time of fast digitalization of services? These and other questions are at the core of the Track-IN project. We know that we are addressing huge, complex challenges. Still, they always seem to be easier to address than the challenges faced by those youths that inspired me, ten years ago, to pose these and other questions.
Francisco Simões
University Institute of Lisbon – Iscte
Principal Investigator of the Track-IN project: Public employment services tracking effectiveness in supporting rural NEETs
