The proportion of young Brazilians aged 15 to 29 who neither work nor study (NEETs) fell from 25.8 percent in 2021 to 22.3 percent in 2022, according to data published on Wednesday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). However, the proportion is much higher among the country’s poorest.
Of the total of 10.9 million young NEETs, 61.2 percent were poor, with a per capita household income of less than USD 6.85 a day, and 14.8 percent were extremely poor, with a per capita household income of less than USD 2.15 a day, according to the World Bank’s poverty lines.
In Brazil’s Northeast, its poorest region, 75.5 percent of young people who did not study and were not employed were in poverty, and 22.5 of young NEETs were in extreme poverty.
Black and brown women comprised 47.8% of poor young people and 44.7% of extremely poor young people, followed by black or brown men, of whom 33.3% were in poverty and 26.6% in extreme poverty.
Furthermore, in 2022, a total of 4.7 million unemployed young people were not looking for work. According to the IBGE, the reasons for this are related to care duties for relatives and household chores for 2 million women, while 420,000 men cited health problems as the main issue. Both genders also cited studying on their own as one of the reasons for not wanting to work.
According to the OECD, NEETs are “at risk of becoming socially excluded — individuals with income below the poverty-line and lacking the skills to improve their economic situation.”
In 2022, a total of 41.5 percent of people between the ages of 25 and 64 had not completed compulsory basic education — that is, high school. This is more than double the OECD average for the same age group in 2021 (20.1 percent).
The proportion of people without a high school diploma in Brazil is also higher than in Colombia (37.9%), Argentina (33.5%), or Chile (28%). Brazilians aged 25 to 64 with a college degree made up 20.7% in 2022, around half of the OECD average in 2021 (41.1%).
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