According to a study titled “GENTICO” carried out by UNIMER (a market research company) and kölbi, and which specifically analyzed the population between the ages of 12 and 35 years which represent more than half of the population, a 17% of these group of people in the country currently don’t work or study.

This analysis is part of a bigger report which was done in 2016, titled “GENTICO: The Truth About The Generations in Costa Rica” and which had the purpose of identifying the real generational groups in the specific reality of the country, and understanding their behavior to demystify the international theories about the generations that are used to divide the population into groups for marketing purposes

The second part of the investigation was done between August 17 and the 29th this year through face to face surveys and has a 2.8% margin of error. Following the information provided by the study, the 17% represents 307,781 young that are not registered under the public or private educational systems nor are they currently working. In Costa Rica and most Latin countries, this population is commonly referred to as “ninis” (for the phrase in Spanish ni estudia, ni trabaja)

The total population in this age range is of 1.8 million people, out of which 33% (approximately 594,0000) of the people in this age range only work, while 38% (684,000.00) only study and only 12% (216,000) do both, work and study.

The number of 17% that don’t work or study matches the number provided in 2016 by the State of the Region Report, carried out by the program State of the Nation, with the difference than in this particular study the age range considered was between 15 and 24-year-olds and the total number of idle population was close to 150,000.

Although the study doesn’t cover the reasons these group of people doesn’t have a job or study, the national director of Employment of the Ministry of Labor, Andrés Romero, explained in an interview with daily La Nación, that this has to do with poverty conditions, since close to 80% of these population have not finished high-school, don’t have work experience and they don’t have the possibility of investing in their education.

The Ministry of Labor has implemented several programs with the objective of offering opportunities to these group, one of them is Empléate, which offers training, financial support and information to young people looking for jobs; there’s also the program Mi Primer Empleo, which offers internships and incentives to participating companies.