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U.N. Puts Spotlight on Youth in Tough Global Climate

Elizabeth Whitman

WASHINGTON, Jul 26 2011 (IPS) - Government leaders, U.N. officials and representatives from over 400 hundred youth organisations concluded two days of talks Tuesday on such issues as the importance of youth in eradicating poverty and how to stabilise the global economic system in the face of myriad challenges.

What Joseph Deiss, the General Assembly president, called in a briefing the “vast and untapped potential” of youth has been more than evident over the past half year or so in the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, where disgruntled youth, among others, coordinated protests and demonstrations and sparked revolutions using methods such as Facebook and Twitter.

Youth – people between the ages of 15 and 24 – comprise 18 percent of the world’s population. Eighty-seven percent of those youth live in developing countries.

In a briefing, leaders including Deiss and the ambassadors of Austria and Benin, co-facilitators for the meeting’s outcome document, acknowledged that despite the vast promise that youth possess, countries and international organisations lack a formal structure to support and enhance that potential.

Today, in the wake of the global economic crisis, roughly 81 million youth are unemployed, and even those employed are subject to work longer hours with lower earnings. Other challenges to youth development include armed conflict, foreign occupation, and terrorism.

Ahmad Alhindawi, a Jordanian from the group Leaders of Tomorrow, told reporters that the U.N. needed to rethink the coordination of youth affairs, noting that no U.N. agency exists for youth. Yet the U.N. has divisions specifically for issues concerning women, children and HIV/AIDS.

Alhindawi stressed that any agency, however, must engage with youth and work with them as “partners, not beneficiaries”. Youth groups create opportunities for democracy at a grassroots level, he said, but not if international groups do all the work for those groups.

In an echo of this idea, Monique Coleman, actress and U.N. Youth Champion, urged that groups “spend less time talking about young people and more time talking to young people.”

To foster dialogue and encourage discussion, the U.N. held panels and plenary discussions Monday and Tuesday, and participants in the meetings could also attend a variety of side events at the U.N. and in its vicinity. The topics of those discussions ranged from the importance of broadband Internet to youth in the Arab states to the impact of social media.

Need for concrete action

Alhindawi called for “concrete actions” rather than just talk on the parts of governments and international organisations, even as the components of this high-level meeting centred on discussion and dialogue.

When youth are provided with opportunities, he told IPS, “All their talents and potential will be reached.”

He pointed to the revolutions and violence in Arab countries as the cost of not working with young people and incorporating their needs and interests into development frameworks and mechanisms.

Although leaders agreed that youth are important and that governments must cooperate with them to provide them with opportunities, consensus seemed limited to the need for action, both by the U.N. and governments.

Jean-Francis Zinsou, for instance, Benin’s ambassador to the U.N., said that the world body needed to act more to help member states to counter unemployment and formulate policies that would help youth transition to adults.

So even as officials stressed the importance of acting to help youth, few seemed able to offer tangible actions to further the goals of youth development.

A changing world

Coleman, however, had a few specific suggestions about how youth could contribute to development.

“Young people especially are going to have to shift their way of thinking to be more of a humanitarian perspective,” she told IPS. In order to do so, she advocated encouraging youth to volunteer from a young age to teach them different ways of contributing to their communities.

She called for a change of values and for people to stop “chasing the money” and instead ask, “How can I solve this particular social problem?”

She highlighted the social business model – where businesses are created to solve problems, and their profits go back into solving the problem rather than those who started the business – as one possible framework for change.

The devotion of several side events to Internet technology and social media, along with leaders’ numerous references to them, underscored the recognition that such tools have and will continue to have a significant impact on shaping the world that youth are inheriting and as such are forces that governments and leaders must take into consideration.

The outcome document of the Meeting stated that its members stressed “the need for further efforts to promote the interests of youth… by supporting young people in developing their potential and talents and tackling obstacles facing youth.”

It also pledged to “address the high rates of youth unemployment” and “strengthen the use of communication technology to improve the quality of life of young people.”

Indeed, Ajay Maken, minister of state for youth affairs and sports of India, noted in his opening remarks for one of the panels that the “pace of technological advancement is best appreciated by the youth”.