Understanding Well-being and Poverty among Rural Youth in Peru: Advancing Life Chances by Exploring Barriers and Potential

Framed within the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG10 (Reducing Inequalities), this collaboration focuses on the nature, promise, and challenge of human well-being among rural youth in Peru. Defined as individuals aged 15-29, there are an estimated 1.8 million young adults in rural Peru (INEI, 2016), and yet this sizable group has been neglected in policy and academic circles. These youth live across Peruvian regions, including the Andean highlands (66%), the Amazon jungle (22%), and the coast (12%) (INEI, 2015). A majority of rural youth are living in poverty (54%), which compares starkly to less than a fifth of their urban counterparts (19%) (INEI, 2009). Like rural populations generally, rural youth face infrastructure and institutional disadvantages. Educationally, rural youth attain, on average, 9 years of schooling, as compared to their urban peers who reach 11 (INEI, 2015). Another example, 14% do not have access to basic services (e.g., water, sewage), as compared to only 2% of urban youth. Although there has been an expansion of rural services and opportunities in the past decade, several of these structural gaps remain unchanged. There is an urgent need, therefore, to fully understand the unique constraints facing rural youth. Their current inability to fully achieve and take advantage of their human capabilities has consequences in human development.