Around 1 million young people in Turkey not at school or in workforce

“Around 35.2 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 19 across the country do not go to school. A majority of these young people are graduated from primary school at most. Some 950,000 of these 2.1 million people also do not work,” said the note, prepared in line with the Turkish Statistics Institute’s (TÜİK) Household Workforce Survey results. 



Some 260,000 of the 950,000 people neither at school or in work are males and the remaining 688,000 are females, according to the BETAM note. 

BETAM noted that only 64.8 percent of Turkey’s young population between the age of 15 and 19 went to school in 2013. The remainder either worked or were idle.

“If Turkey wants to overcome the middle-income trap, it needs to make greater investments in youth education and create ways to include these young people in the educational system. The recent extension of compulsory education to 12 years may have enabled young people to be enrolled at schools, but it does not guarantee their attendance at classes,” said the BETAM note. 

Around a quarter of Turkey’s population is comprised of young people, which BETAM described as a “great opportunity.” 

“The higher concentration of young people represents a great opportunity for countries to achieve economic transformations, namely economic growth and developments,” said the note.

Only 28.8 percent of the non-schooling young women were members of the workforce in 2013, which gives negative signals about the future of women’s participation in the workforce, said the BETAM note. 

Around 72,000 young men and 18,000 young women between the ages of 15 and 19 said they quit looking for a job as they had lost hope of finding one, BETAM also stated.