✺ The context
One in six young Dominicans is neither studying nor working
More than 300,000 people aged 15 to 24, and almost two in three of them are women. The official data, and what it means in a town like Las Terrenas.
A number that is rarely said in full
They are called "ninis": young people who neither study nor work. The word sounds like a label and hides real people. It is worth starting with the true size of the problem.
According to the National Statistics Office, in 2022 there were 309,611 young people aged 15 to 24 in that situation in the Dominican Republic: 17.6% of all the country's young people. Roughly one in six.
The figure is coming down. The Central Bank's National Continuous Labour Force Survey puts it at 28.3% in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and at 16.59% in the first quarter of 2026 for the 14-to-24 group. International estimates, which use a different method, put it higher: 25.8% in 2024 according to the ILO and the World Bank. Either reading describes hundreds of thousands of people.
Who a young person out of school and out of work really is
The stereotype is a boy on a street corner. The data says something else.
197,702 women
- Of the 309,611 young people out of school and out of work in 2022, almost two in three were women.
111,909 men
- Just over a third. They are the ones who most often leave school to work in informal jobs.
77 births per 1,000
- Fertility rate among girls aged 15 to 19 in 2019. Early motherhood is the most common way young women leave education.
58.7%
- Of the boys who leave school do so in order to work, and never return.
The World Bank studied the phenomenon across Latin America and summed it up in one sentence: the typical nini is not the idle young man of the news reports, but a young urban woman without a completed secondary diploma. Men leave the system by another route: they drop out of secondary school to earn money and fall into unstable jobs from which it is hard to return to study.
Source: ONE, from the ENCFT 2022; UNFPA Dominican Republic, 2024; World Bank, Out of School and Out of Work: Risk and Opportunities for Latin America's Ninis, 2016; USAID, Rapid Education and Risk Analysis — Dominican Republic, 2019.
Having a job does not solve everything either
Being employed is not the same as having a job you can live on.
Youth unemployment closed 2025 at 12.4%, against 4.9% for the labour force as a whole in the first quarter of that year. Among women, unemployment is 2.7 times higher than among men. And more than half of the country's employed, 53.4% in the first quarter of 2025, work without access to social security. It is the lowest level since the survey began, and it is still more than half.
There is a positive signal hidden in that data: in that quarter, formal employment among 15-to-24-year-olds grew by 27,908 jobs while informal employment fell by 15,368. The market is starting to formalise young people. But it does so mostly for those with an education: of the new formal jobs, 89,721 went to people with university education and 78,409 to people with secondary education.
That is the trap. The young person who left school to work is exactly the one formalisation leaves behind.
Source: Central Bank of the Dominican Republic, Quarterly Labour Market Bulletin, January–March 2025; ENCFT data presented by the Social Policy Cabinet, August 2026.
What this means in Las Terrenas
Las Terrenas has an advantage most towns in the country do not: a sector that hires all year round and is growing. Tourism supports close to one in six jobs in the country.
But hiring is not the same as hiring locally. Without technical training, the young person from the town competes at a disadvantage with someone who arrives from outside with experience. Without professional habits, the one who gets in leaves within months. And the young woman with a small child needs a schedule and support that a seasonal job rarely offers.
That is why the programme was designed the way it was.
Free and 12 weeks long
- So that cost and time are not the reason for not trying.
A selection that does not exclude
- A personal interview and a basic assessment with nothing to prepare. Anyone who struggles to read is not left out: Spanish is taught from week one.
Three days in a company, two in class
- Provable experience inside a real business from week five.
Groups of 12 and a life project
- One-to-one support, because the reason to stay in a job is personal.
Six months of follow-up
- With meetings at 6 and 12 months, so that the first stumble is not the end.
We are not solving a national statistic. We train 108 young people a year, in a single town, each with a name. It is the scale at which one in six stops being a percentage.