Youth empowerment and volunteering is emerging as an important focus in VSO programmes across the region in its efforts to promote local and national volunteering for development. Asia hosts a large number of populations of young people (age 14-28)
faced with numerous challenges of unemployment, lack of quality education, sense of
identity and forums to raise their voices including increased communal violence in the
name of religion, ethnicity and caste systems. Youth active involvement and
empowerment is the key in addressing these challenges of poverty that is also being
widely recognised by the development actors, governments and academia all over the
world.