Considering the panorama of uncertainty and disruption brought by the accelerated arrival of new technologies and the emergence of new professions, designing the appropriate policies for young people to acquire the necessary skills to successfully enter the labor market would require placing their voices in the gravity center. Therefore, together with several organizations we wanted to understand, without prejudice or stereotypes, what is behind the labor and educational decisions of young people in Latin America and the Caribbean.

This is how the book Millennials in Latin America and the Caribbean: to work or to study? resulted from a joint project that brought together the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Espacio Público (EP), and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) for more than four years. In this book, the findings are synthesized after surveying and interviewing more than 15,000 young people from nine countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. In each of them, research and coordination of the project at the local level was carried out by well-known study centers and universities.

With these findings, we want to support and inform the formulation of better public policies to facilitate entry into the labor market as well as the transition between school and work of the next generation of workers in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The study was co-edited by Rafael Novella (IDB), Andrea Repetto (Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez y Espacio Público), Carolina Robino (IDRC) and Graciana Rucci (IDB).