young people from all over tell how they see it;

Kenya

"I used to work as a casual labourer in a pharmacy, and I hoped I would be a pharmacist. But it costs 120,000 shillings a year (£1,100) to go to college, and even if I had the grades I do not have this money. My father cannot help at all. He is a driver for someone and he is already paying to send my two brothers to school. He has no money left for me. There are some scholarships for colleges in countries like the US and the UK, but there is a lot of corruption with them. Even to apply you have to cough up a bribe. "

Brasil

"We live in an American culture. Everyone of my age just wants to eat in McDonald's. People are not politicised because there is no education. Everyone just wants a house and a job. "

Japan

"I've been saving up by working as a hostess. It is good money - about £800 a month - but we work hard until 2am almost every night. There is no sex involved: just pouring drinks, lighting cigarettes and chatting to middle-aged men in high-paid jobs. I used to be upset if one of them touched my bum, but now I put up with it. I look at it as a burden of being born a woman. "

Pakistan

"My greatest fear is trying to balance it all, my beliefs with my practical life. Here, if you are in a good job you are offered bribes, or you have to pay them and you have to do things that go against the values that I have. I don't want to do these things but I don't want to limit myself either. When you see the priests and the mullahs telling you how to act, often they are not living the way they tell you to either. "

Mexico

"The money isn't bad and lots of girls hang around. Here people get married at 13 or 15, but I still don't want to, although I suppose I will. I don't think much about politics, and the government never understands that they should let us sow more marijuana seeds. With the extra money you can maybe build a little house. The plants grow big here and almost every family has been doing it forever, as far as I know. "

Germany

"Being 18 is important to me. Under German law, it marks the start of a five-year period in which I have to make up my mind whether I want to be German or South Korean. My parents came here in 1975, my father to study, my mother to work as a nurse. So I have a Korean passport. My father wants me to take a German one instead. But I don't know. I want to hold on to something that's Korean. Germany's my homeland, but I don't think that I'm German, and I don't think that I'm Korean either, though I speak both languages."