The youth population is key to achieving development goals, both now and in the future. As the imminent leaders, change makers, innovators, and influencers, ASEAN’s youth need to be provided with meaningful opportunities to influence policies that have a direct impact on their lives. For this reason, the ASEAN Members States (AMS) have sustained deliberate efforts towards establishing and implementing evidence-based youth development policies and programmes to realise the potential of this segment of ASEAN’s population. AMS have issued youth laws, youth-related policies, and youth development strategies, providing the necessary infrastructure to cultivate a crop of youth willing to contribute to the development of each country and ASEAN as a whole. Therefore, several AMS have incorporated the establishment and use of the ASEAN Youth Development Index (YDI) to serve as a measure of achievements in key dimensions of youth development across the region.

The launch of the first ASEAN Youth Development Index (YDI) in 2017 was part of the priorities of the ASEAN Senior Officials Meeting on Youth (SOMY) under the ASEAN Work Plan on Youth 2016-2020. The ASEAN YDI was developed to assist the ASEAN Youth Sector in developing initiatives for the youth with evidence-based support. Under the ASEAN Work Plan on Youth 2021-2025, the ASEAN YDI falls under Priority Area 5: ASEAN Awareness, Values, and Identity, as an effort to enable youth to promote ASEAN identity, developing deeper awareness of ASEAN and a greater understanding of ASEAN’s shared values, including in the context of promoting and protecting human rights.

The second ASEAN YDI expands on the first, utilising learnings both from youth development within the region and also from YDIs globally. It merged some indicators from the first iteration and incorporated an analysis of data trends for the period 2016-2020. Therefore, the domains under this second ASEAN YDI include Education and Skills, Health and Well-being, Employment and Opportunity, Participation and Engagement, Equity and Inclusion, Security and Safety as well as ASEAN Values and Identity. As established in the first report, the youth age range is between the ages of 15 – 35, and this will be used as reference for this ASEAN YDI report.