Through the Youth SWAP, ILO introduced youth employment indicators on unemployment and vulnerable employment was introduced in the UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) Joint Implementation Plan. Furthermore, a national workshop on Youth Mainstreaming was organized with the National Youth Commission.

Based on the Secretary-General’s Five-year Action Agenda, the UN System-wide Action Plan on Youth (Youth-SWAP) focuses on the following thematic areas:  employment, entrepreneurship, political inclusion, civic engagement and protection of rights, education, including comprehensive sexuality education, and health. It provides strategic guidance to the UN system as a whole in its work on youth and is intended to enhance coherence and synergy of UN system-wide activities in key areas related to youth development. In celebrating International Youth Day 2015 in the Philippines, Mr. Ahmad Alhendawi, United Nations Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth reiterated the need to invest in young people and highlighted the role of Asia’s youth in driving and sustaining development in the region.

Like most South-east Asian countries, unemployment is a prominent concern for young people in the Philippines. Based on the Philippine Employment Trends 2015, Filipino youth are facing great risk of unemployment. In 2013, there were 1.4 million unemployed youth in the country which suggests that the unemployment problem is primarily a youth phenomenon with almost 50 per cent of the total unemployed falling between the ages of 15 to 24. Young jobseekers are almost three times more likely than their adult counterparts to be unemployed. Another distinctive feature of the youth labour market is the high incidence of unemployment among those with higher educational attainment. A greater proportion of the unemployed (39.3 per cent) have reached college or a post-secondary degree level. Meanwhile almost half (49.3 per cent) of the unemployed youth have completed high school. This seems to suggest that the unemployed are mostly young but relatively educated in search of better options.