Benchmark for Sabah youths
Published on: Friday, January 08, 2016
Kota Kinabalu: Sabah on Thursday became the first state in Malaysia to produce a youth index.Chief Minister Datuk Seri Musa Aman said the Sabah Youth Index 2015 (SYI'15) is a benchmark to measure the level of Sabah youth's wellbeing and will provide vital input, especially for the State Government in formulating policies."I have discussed with the State Cabinet where we will make a follow-up on the findings from the report which is important as we can know the situation faced by the youths.ADVERTISEMENT "We are able to obtain more understanding with the help of the index on what should be done so that the youths will get proper attention," Musa said after launching SYI'15, here, Thursday.Also present were Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Seri Yahya Hussin, Federal Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin as well as State Youth and Sports Minister Datuk Seri Tawfiq Abu Bakar Titingan and his Assistant, Datuk Masiung Banah.Musa also said youths are valuable assets whose skills and expertise should be pooled together to contribute towards the development of the State."As future leaders, youths are the ones who will determine the progress and wellbeing that we are experiencing now will be preserved," he said.ADVERTISEMENT And to materialise the Youth Strengthening Development and Human Capital Preparation Agenda, the State Government in Budget 2016 has provided more than RM200 million to various agencies to implement numerous programmes.On SYI'15, Tawfiq said, the overall wellbeing level of youths in Sabah is at medium level with a score value of 68.68.
ADVERTISEMENT
"The score has shown that various relevant approaches should be taken by stakeholders to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of youths in Sabah," Tawfiq said.The research in SYI'15 was conducted in 28 districts throughout Sabah involving 4,027 respondents from among 798,400 youths between 15 and 30 years old. Measuring Sabah youths' life wellbeing involved 12 domains, namely self-development, social relation, identity, self-potential, health, education, economic wellbeing, safety, political socialisation, use of media, leisure time and free from deviant behaviour.Meanwhile, Khairy encouraged other state governments to follow the footsteps of Sabah."It's useful to have a state-level youth index as you can have a more in-depth analysis. And you can also tweak some of the domains and some of the indicators to make sure that it's more reflective of the challenges confronted by the respective states."For instance, in Sabah, the domains or indicators associated with security can be tweaked where the security concerns here are different than the security concerns in Selangor, for example.Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express’s Telegram channel.
Daily Express Malaysia
"So it's important to get a better understanding at a broader cross section of respondents to have a state-level youth index."We encourage them (the state governments) to do it as IYRES (Institute for Youth Research Malaysia) is ready to assist the state governments to prepare their own indexes but it's up to them to assist us because we need a machinery on the ground that comes from the state government," he said.