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When the World Bank launched this year's Development Marketplace, a programme that supports innovative development ideas with early-stage seed funding, James Wolfensohn, the bank's president, insisted that the people running the programme should have an average age of less than 30.

"They have done a spectacular job - much better than if I had thrown it into the system and had official bureaucracy deal with it," he says.

Mr Wolfensohn's decision reflects a growing recognition on the part of the World Bank that today's young people have the potential to make bigger contributions to solving issues, such as poverty and education, if they are seen, not as a problem, but as part of the solution. This sentiment is also expressed by a growing number of multilateral institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

"We need to consult them more and I do not think the bank has done an adequate job of that in the past," says Mr Wolfensohn. "The first thing we need to do is to recognise that they have a contribution to make. The second thing is that we need to give them a responsibility for designing the sort of world that they want."

The idea of engaging the very people that governments, multilateral funding agencies and NGOs are trying to help is one that has been gaining currency in development circles in recent years. But young people are seen as a particularly potent force for change.

Approaches to solving youth unemployment clearly reveal a new desire to engage rather than serve, with young people increasingly treated as a solution through the fostering of entrepreneurship.

Recommendations by a high-level panel of the Youth Employment Network, a joint initiative of the World Bank, the United Nations and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) emphasise the contribution small enterprises can make to employment generation. It advises countries to reduce the cumbersome procedures and regulations that hamper start-ups, making it easier for young people to create their own businesses.

Juan Somavia, director-general of the ILO, believes that young people have a crucial part to play in eradicating poverty and creating economic stability. "Their potential is enormous," he says. "Today's young people are the best-educated and trained generation ever. In terms of employment, the expected inflow of young people into the labour market, rather than being viewed as a problem, should be recognised as presenting an enormous opportunity and potential for economic and social development."

However, shifting demographics will mean that engaging youth in these issues may be a necessity rather than a choice.

Of the 6bn people on the planet today, 2.8bn are under the age of 24 - more than the total world population in 1950 and of those, 1.8bn are under the age of 15. So, in terms of sheer numbers, young people will be a force to be reckoned with.

"It is very important to recognise that the youth who are developing now are going to be with us for a lot longer than anyone else," says David Hornbeck, president and chief executive officer of the International Youth Foundation.

"When you consider that nearly 50 per cent of the population is youth - and in some countries it is more like 70 per cent - the demographic inevitability of this and its impact on the legal, economic and political systems of the world make this absolutely urgent."

For many young people, however, the future still looks bleak. They are two to three times more likely to be unemployed as adults in most countries.

Even if they are employed, working conditions, particularly in the developing world, may be grim and their employment contracts often provide little or no protection against dismissal or compensation in the event of redundancies.

Many are fighting for their existence in war-torn regions. And lack of access to education remains a daunting challenge - particularly for girls, with at least 9m more girls than boys left out of school every year.

"This is still a world where girls are second class citizens," says Carol Bellamy, Unicef's executive director. "We know, for example, that the face of HIV is increasingly a female face, and so much of this is based on violence and discrimination and girls being more powerless."

Unicef, in a report released in December, argues that international development efforts are drastically under-serving girls, leaving hundreds of millions of girls and women uneducated. The report calls on development agencies, governments, families and communities to intensify efforts to address the barriers keeping girls out of school.

When it comes to HIV/ Aids, young people are particularly vulnerable. As the crisis spreads mostly in sub-Saharan Africa but with the disease increasing at alarming rates in China and India about half of new HIV/Aids cases occur among those in the 15- to 24-year-old category. Business, aware that today's young people represent future employees, customers, shareholders and activist opponents, is realising that it has a significant stake in helping to solve such issues.

The idea of the corporate sector becoming involved in development is not without its detractors. Many argue that companies' expertise is in making and selling products and services, not in running health and education programmes.

Their involvement, say critics, tends to be focused on the countries in which they invest and the danger is that programmes they establish can be left high and dry if they move their operations elsewhere.

However, in recent years, the private sector has moved from traditional philanthropic ventures into more sustainable partnerships with non-governmental organisations, multilateral agencies and non-profit groups involved in initiatives supporting youth development.

Many companies are investing in education and learning programmes. In Australia, for example, the Foundation for Young Australians is supporting information technology programmes for out-of-school and indigenous youth through a grant from Lucent Technologies Foundation.

And Nokia, in partnership with the International Youth Foundation, has launched "Make a Connection", an initiative that aims to give young people life skills such as self-confidence, creative thinking, team working and conflict resolution.

The threat of reputational damage has also been a catalyst for productive programmes involving the private sector.

Nike and Gap, which have both been targeted by anti-sweatshop campaigns, now work with the World Bank and the International Youth Foundation in the Global Alliance for Workers and Communities, which aims to improve the working lives of people in developing countries and to monitor the factories of global companies' subcontractors.

The IYF's Mr Hornbeck points out that there is a pay-off here for companies. "If people are healthy, attendance is going to be higher...if workers are satisfied, there's lower staff turnover, and if people are educated consumers, that is good for good business," he says.

Nevertheless, Mr Wolfensohn points out that the sort of programmes initiated by public, private and non-profit sectors represent a drop in the ocean compared to young people's need for basic education, healthcare and jobs. Society, he argues, still lacks real understanding of how to distribute its resources.

"We spend $800bn a year on learning to kill each other and we spend $55bn a year, if that's a real number, on development," he says.

It is a balance that needs to shift. And young people must be placed at the heart of the action if the global development agenda is to succeed in eradicating poverty and establishing the kind of stable communities that can generate economic growth and foster peace.