BANGKOK — About 800 million young people will enter developing economies’ labour markets in the coming years and find no jobs unless governments change course, the head of the UN Development Programme said on Tuesday.
Alexander De Croo, the UNDP administrator, told a New York press briefing from Bangkok, where the World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings are under way, that 1.2 billion young people will graduate from school over the next 15 years and only about 400 million of them will find work. “Those numbers should absolutely be a wake-up call to all of us,” he said.
The projection is not fate. De Croo attributed the gap to demographics and to current technology, and called it a matter of policy rather than something that resolves itself. “Job creation is actually the only real sustainable way for people to grow out of poverty,” he said, adding that care, agriculture and tourism will keep creating many jobs even as AI accelerates.
He described a “triple shock” for many developing countries: high energy costs, one of the most pronounced El Niño events since 1950, and very high borrowing costs, UN News reported. The energy leg of that shock has no near end. The IMF now assumes a Hormuz reopening only in March 2027, as TEH reported.
The weather leg is still building, with El Niño heat already past the 1982, 1997 and 2015 peaks and forecasters expecting more. The debt leg is in UNDP’s report, No Time to Recover: the median developing country now spends 9.5 percent of government income on interest payments, and for the first time since 2010 the number of people in multidimensional poverty has risen.
UNDP is pairing the warning with two programmes. The Investment Accelerator helps governments improve investment rules and move investment-ready projects forward. The Jobs for Prosperity Facility identifies sectors that create many jobs, matches skills to employers and removes barriers to hiring. Both are backed by the World Bank Group, the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with pilots in Nepal, Yemen, Haiti, Lebanon and Ghana.
The scale is easier to see against what already exists. The International Labour Organization put youth unemployment at 12.4 percent in 2025, with about 260 million young people not in education, employment or training. Richer countries show the same strain: TEH reported that Britain’s inactive young generation costs the country £125 billion a year.
The UNDP report itself was not available to read for this article, so the 800 million figure rests on De Croo’s account of it. The briefing as reported does not say which countries face the largest gaps, what the projection assumes about growth, or how much the two new programmes will cost.
Eight hundred million is what happens if nothing changes. The briefing did not say who decides to change it.
