The GenDev Blog

A place for the thoughts and comments from our global team.

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by Rebecca

Beginner’s Guide: Resources for Youth, Development, and the MDGs

May 15, 2013 in Beginner's Guide

Stacks of Papers

There is a lot of information out there pertaining to the progress of the Millennium Development Goals and the post-2015 debates. Here are just a few resources that are useful for learning about both the basics and the in-depth analysis of development.

Government Spending Watch: With the aim of monitoring who is spending what on the MDGs, this is a new resource to better understand the economics. This Thursday, 16 May 2013, they will launch the Government Spending Watch 2013 Report at an event sponsored by the Oversees Development Institute (ODI) in London. The event will also be lived streamed, and can be followed via #govspendwatch. According to GSW, ”Although the Millennium Development Goals were agreed in 2000, there has never been comprehensive data available on what developing countries are spending to achieve them. This event will present Government Spending Watch, a new advocacy, campaigning, analysis and data transparency initiative which for the first time reveals how much developing country governments are spending on health; education; water/sanitation; agriculture/food; gender rights; environment and climate change; social protection. By increasing transparency on spending, the initiative aims to increase advocacy, campaigning and spending on the goals.”

UN MDGs Report 2012: This is the official UN report on the MDGs, which is produced annually. It provides an overview of progress on each goal and some specific targets.

UN World Youth Report 2013: This report is still being prepared, but will focus on youth and migration. The topic be youth migration. The last UN World Youth Report was compiled in 2011, and focused on youth unemployment.

The Broker: Here you can find a very comprehensive listing of reports pertaining to the post-2015 agenda and brief summaries.

The Guardian: A major UK newspaper, they have a special online section dedicated to the MDGs. With a wide variety of contributing authors and topics, it is good for keeping up to date with current issues, debates, and developments.

This guide is by no means exhaustive, and we invite you to share your resources on the post-2015 framework. If there is a good resource from your country, please share it with us in the comments, via Facebook, or Twitter!

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by Tim

Youth: Not a Number, But a Feeling

May 2, 2013 in Youth

Most human cultures have a coming of age ritual. This may be a bar mitzvah, quinceanera, seijin shiki, sehra or sweet sixteen, and may hold religious, social or cultural significance. However, in the broadest sense, these rituals recognize that an individual has reached a point in their life where they begin to take responsibility for themselves. Through adolescence there comes transference of responsibility, from full dependence on an adult to full reliance on oneself.

Jumbled Numbers

Can youth be defined by numbers?

No consensus exists as to when this transference takes place. Different societies around the world have set a variety of age limits in law relating to exercising democratic rights, consenting to a sexual encounter, drinking, driving or getting married. In the UK the law states that age 16 you are deemed capable of being make decisions about sex, but this ranges from 12 to 21 elsewhere. To vote in the UK you must be 18, but only 16 in Brazil or even 21 in Cameroon.

Generation Development is concerned with youth and young people, a concept that is not easily categorized by numbers alone. The transition from childhood to adulthood is not discreet. There is no obvious change over point, but instead a gradual process of ever increasing personal responsibility.  We do not seek to represent the needs of children, those individuals who remain both socially and legally dependent on their parents, which makes our youngest participants around 15 or 16 years old.

The transition from being a young person to not being a young person any more is even less tangible. Various different youth organizations set upper age limits of 21, 24, 28, 30 or 35 depending on their context and mission. The UN defines youth as 15 – 24, but when does one stop being young?

Generation Development seeks to capture the views of those who will see the next set of development goals through. If the timetable were set again at 15 years, we would be looking at an aspirational date of 2030. A 15-year-old today would be 32 and a 30-year-old 47. To me, the young people Generation Development want to engage share a specific set of characteristics. They feel underrepresented by democratic institutions, but have a burning desire to participate and have their voices heard. They receive the brunt of the world’s economic difficulties, but want the opportunity to be economically active. They want access to opportunities to further their education and improve life for themselves and their communities. They have a vision of a better future for them and their children, united around global issues such as tackling climate change and improving global health.

However, for me the ultimate definition is that if you feel young, you are probably young enough to be a member of Generation Development.

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by Rebecca

Embracing Uncertainty: The Unknown Future of Climate Change

April 28, 2013 in MDG 7 (Sustainability)

Ashley discusses the unknown future of climate change and how development policy must take this into account.

Climate change and environmental sustainability are some of the newest and most discussed international development issues. They are inherently complex and interdependent problems that will require long-term, cooperative solutions between all countries.

Cooperation has been a challenge, during the many conferences and policy meetings, both on the international and national scales. Tensions exist between what science says should be done and what can be politically agreed upon to slow the temperature rise.  These tensions have been attributed to national interests taking priority and a commitment to economic growth that is seen as incompatible with carbon reduction initiatives.

Perhaps a more determining factor that has limited cooperation is the overwhelming amount of scientific evidence being discussed. There are multiple interpretations predicting the effects of greenhouse gas emissions will have in the future. Policy makers don’t know how to translate this constant and evolving stream of information into coherent policy initiatives. There is just no firm consensus to what can and should be done

Recently, The Economist proposed that the warming globe might be less due to human activity than previously stated in the widely cited IPCC 4th assessment report. The article triggered an immediate rebuttal by the Center for International Forestry research, arguing that this information was based on incomplete information and a misinterpretation of longitudinal temperature datasets.

This information came just months after an article proposing that not only are particular fuel particles, known as ‘black carbon’, the principle driver of climate change, but that they are even more consequential than previously thought due to their super heat-trapping abilities. From this point of view, mitigation is even more of a policy priority.

There is also the highly anticipated IPCC 5th Assessment Report due out next year.  Preliminary drafts and coverage of the report anticipate that new models predicting the effects of rising temperatures will show more conservative changes than previously published.  This seems to be consistent with recent research findings that past projection models have overshot actual near surface temperatures until 2010.  Whether these changes are anthropogenic (caused by humans) is still unclear.

Perhaps these examples don’t demonstrate conflicting evidence, but illustrate the dynamic nature of earth temperatures and the complex interplay of the world and its inhabitants that we have yet to fully understand.  I personally am not convinced that this means we are any closer to understanding how the earth’s cycle works and which stage of it we currently live in.

A level of acceptance of uncertainty is needed.  Although we are responsible for the carbon emissions in the air, and to a certain extent, can control how much is emitted, we cannot be certain which carbon particles affect the globe the most and to what extent. Mitigating climate change should still be a priority, but an expectation of a world that will most likely look different from the one we live in today should be the premise that we work from. We don’t have all the answers or knowledge and we need to accept this.

We should move beyond trying to make policy based on particular projections and specific pictures of the effects of a rise in 1°C will be and accept the unknown. We don’t know what will happen, what it will look like, or how people who are currently in their youth will live in the future.  One thing is for certain, adaptation is imminent, and should be treated as such.

I was relieved to see that adaptation was a big priority in My World 2015 survey. It recognised that we have moved beyond depending on mitigation solutions to live in the future and toward the area of uncertainty where we should prepare the most vulnerable countries, their futures and young people for a world that may possibly (but we are unsure) look very different from the one we live in today.

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by Rebecca

The Promise of Youth

April 21, 2013 in Youth

Mountain Peak

Youth is potential.

Youth is energy. Youth is not fearlessness, but an openness to trying. We say yes. Like, a lot. We say yes to meeting new people, exploring new places, having new experiences. We do not shy away from change. Quite the contrary in fact. We seek change out and embrace it fully and unabashedly.

This energy of a young person cannot be killed, only transformed. Failure does not destroy our energy, it just transforms it so we can apply it elsewhere. We have resilience in heaps and a vision of how the world could look. We are always ready to climb the next mountain, no matter how dauting it may appear. Robert F. Kennedy aptly summarizes this sentiment:

‘’This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life, but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.’’

Youth might not always have all the knowledge. But we dig ever deeper to learn, to grow, to expand our understanding of the world. We have fresh eyes, and see things that have long been overlooked or taken as givens. We ask, sometimes rather persistently, why? Why are things how they are? Why can’t things be done differently?

So this is my plea to the policy makers of the world: Remember what it is like to be young. Remember the feeling of a whole lifetime ahead of you. Of infinite possibilities, seemingly endless energy, of countless sunrises to be seen, and untold horizons to be chased.

 

Remember the potential and promise of youth.

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by Fionn

Land-Grabs or Land Security? An Emergent Development Issue

April 17, 2013 in International Development, Southeast Asia

Stop land grabs: Our land, Our lives

Courtesy http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/

By their nature, global development issues are complex, multifaceted, and interrelated. More often than not, impossible value judgments must be made on which aims to prioritise and how to address them, whilst others must wait in turn.

Land security is such an example of a complex development issue. According to Oxfam, an area of land eight times the size of the UK has been seized and sold off globally in the last decade, plunging millions into poverty, and disenfranchising families of land that many have had for generations. Yet despite its scale, the issue is only beginning to gain traction in development and aid circles.

Although Africa is most prominent in the debate over land-grabs, Southeast Asian communities have also suffered greatly from a phenomenon that strikes at the heart of global inequality. Driven by spikes in global food prices and increasing demand for biofuel in the EU and the US, governments across the region are seizing land to sell and lease it to the highest bidders.

Take Laos for example, where over a quarter of arable land has been sold to foreign investment vehicles as “agricultural investments”. Indonesia plans to more than triple its concessions of land under oil palm in the next few years to almost 30 million hectares, whilst Burma, Malaysia and the Philippines are all expanding their provision in this area.

Using arable land to produce biofuels exacerbates food supply chains already reeling from increasing population and spikes in speculative food commodity markets. Land grabs have serious consequences in the short, medium, and long-term.

Forced from their land, farmers and their families in Southeast Asia often find themselves living in destitute conditions. They receive little or no compensation for their lost property and earning potential. In Cambodia, euphemistically named “relocation communities” are widespread, particularly around the capital of Phnom Penh. These are desperate slums that the government has established to re-house victims of stolen land. These slums often have no utilities, urban planning or infrastructure, and are hotbeds of disease.

Phnom Penh Relocation Camp from Land Grab

Phnom Penh Relocation Camp (Courtesy Stephen Ford Photography)

In some communities this practice is meeting resistance. In Vietnam, land-grabbing is becoming a major political issue for the aging Communist party in place there. In Cambodia, the government has recognised how land-grabbing leads to poverty and protest, vowing to end the practice – but only after having already sold almost all of the country’s “available” land.

Without land security, hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia live a vulnerable life of subsistence. Without guarantees of protection many have no incentive to develop their land, whilst those unlucky enough to have had their land stolen have no basis from which to improve their lives.

Despite this, issues of land security did not make the My World 2015 survey, which asked for peoples’ priorities for the 2015 global development agenda.  Without land security, it is impossible for many across the developing world to gain access to the tools, infrastructure and safety needed to improve their lives. Its omission seems strange when many other issues require land security for their realisation.

Some of the world’s biggest charities are leading the way in trying to bring this issue higher up in the international development agenda. Action Aid, for example, are campaigning against bio-fuels due to their role in driving land grabs, whilst Oxfam are calling on the World Bank to block financing that feeds this egregious practice.

Yet without grass-roots support for these activities, few will be able to apply enough pressure to end the global rush for devastating land-grabbing practices. Consequently, land security should feature in the emergent development framework that replaces the MDGs – lest we risk disenfranchising a global generation from the means to earning a living.

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by Sarah

The World We Want: An Unprecedented Opportunity

April 14, 2013 in MDGs, Youth

I recently spent a fun weekend with friends at a youth hostel just outside London. On the surface, that doesn’t sound too odd or abnormal. But there was actually something very unusual about it. Very special, in fact. When I arrived, I knew nobody, and had no idea what to expect. Two days later, I had gained a group of friends from all over the world, and together we had achieved something quite remarkable.
Participants of Analysis Weekend

Sarah, Vera and Lewis working hard at youth post-2015 analysis weekend

We were making the most of an unprecedented opportunity to be part of a global conversation about the future of the world. In order to help design a new international framework beyond the Millennium Development Goals, the UN have been reaching out to consult people all over the globe about the challenges they face in improving their lives. This has never happened before.

Only a small proportion of the world’s population have even heard of the Millennium Development Goals, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that everyone has their own priorities for local, regional or international development, and everyone deserves the chance to make their opinions heard. And young people, who make up more than half of the world, are just as deserving of this chance to influence the next development framework. 

Millennium Development Goals

After the MDGs: What Comes Next?

Recognizing this, the DfID CSO Youth Working Group initiated a project to consult young people on their priorities for development beyond 2015 (thanks to funding from EC Youth in Action). Between October 2012 and January 2013, a total of 346 young people participated in consultations in 12 different countries (Colombia, Croatia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, the Philippines, Romania, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and the UK).

A diverse group of ages, representing 64 ethnicities, and including young people with disabilities, HIV, refugee status, and historically marginalised communities, were ALL given the space to discuss the issues of importance to them. They were given the opportunity to articulate their visions for a better world. You can hear first-hand the experiences of those who ran the post-2015 youth consultations in Croatia, Kyrgyzstan and Romania in this excellent blog.

The 12 consultations created a wealth of information about the issues that young people want to be addressed by the post-2015 framework, and the solutions they propose. I was fortunate to join a team of 13 young people at a residential weekend facilitated by Restless Development, VSO and Y Care to collectively analyse the findings of these consultations.

We made an ambitious, motivated and diligent team, working tirelessly to accurately portray the views of young people all over the world. Our task was to digest the visions, principles, issues and solutions arising from the youth consultations, and summarise them in a useful way to be condensed into a flagship report aimed at decision-makers and policy-makers.

It wasn’t easy: we faced many challenges, such as being overwhelmed with data, yet still finding big gaps, and being tempted to synthesise, yet not wanting to dilute the richness of the raw material. It was good and important that we were a fairly diverse group (for example, one international participant had never left her home country before, whilst others had lived and studied abroad for many years), because our different perspectives helped us avoid making biased assumptions, and allowed us to maintain analytical rigour.

And we succeeded: the results of our two-day analysis workshop were used to produce this report, “Youth Voices on a Post-2015 World”, which was presented to the UN High Level Panel at their recent meeting in Bali.

It was a real pleasure to play a role in the analysis process, and I learnt a lot from my truly inspirational fellow participants – thank you Ana-Teodora Rizescu (Romania), Cosmin Obretin (Romania), Elen Meggy (UK), Gary Clayton (UK), Hrvoje Br?i? (Croatia), Kenneth Green (UK), Laura Williams (UK), Lewis Emmerton (UK), Margareta Delaš (Croatia), Oliver Day (UK), Pedro Telles (Brazil), Tabitha Ha (UK), and Vera Ado (Ghana).

We were all proud to co-operate in such an important undertaking, and I believe we parted with a renewed sense of hope for the future. For me, I came away convinced that young people are excellent agents for change, and determined to do what I can to continually engage my peers in the journey beyond 2015.

One thing is for sure: the young people of today will assume responsibility for the planet and the welfare of its citizens within the lifetime of whatever framework replaces the Millennium Development Goals. It is therefore not just our right, but also our responsibility, to actively participate in the design of such a framework.

We call for world leaders to continue to listen to us, respect us, and include us, because with less than 1000 days remaining until 2015, we will very soon inherit the consequences of the decisions made today. In return, we will continue to demonstrate our remarkable creativity, our community spirit, and our ceaseless commitment to the world we want.

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by Sarah

Youth: Open, Thinking, and Hungry for Change

April 9, 2013 in Youth

I am 26 years old. I still consider myself to be a young person. But what does “youth” mean to me? I no longer qualify for a young person’s railcard, nor for discounted theatre tickets, and I have technically been an adult for 10 years already. Doesn’t that exclude me from the “youth” category? Who decides, and how? Is youth status determined by how old we are, or by what we do, or what we have, or what we want?

I’m pretty sure it can’t simply be a numerical question – if it were, then the expression “young at heart” would be nonsensical. So maybe it’s more about attitude. As a generation, we don’t tend to have much money, or own land, or have dependents, which all means that we can be a lot more flexible in our attitude to life, our work and our social activities. We are free to do what we want, when we want, and how we want. And yet much of our energy is often put into earning money, working towards buying (or building) our own house, and starting our own family. As we progress through these stages of life, we gain the responsibilities (social, political, economic) that define adulthood.

My favourite definition of youth is the:“natural prime of an individual, when he/she has the greatest expectations and the most energy to expend” (Mo Ibrahim Foundation, “Fulfilling the Potential”). I like the idea of a gradual transition towards adulthood, based on passionately and tirelessly seeking the fulfilment of high ideals.

For me, the defining characteristics of youth are:

Yearning for learning

Open to new ideas

Understanding of diversity

Thinking, trying, trusting

Hungry for change

And what about a lower limit for the “youth” bracket? Is a new-born baby technically a young person? I think so – at least, there is one quality of infants that I believe to be relevant here. A baby will continue to cry until his or her needs are met.  And the rest of us can learn a lesson from this: let’s keep crying (or talking, or writing, or lobbying), until the world listens to youth.

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by Tim

Global Health in the Post-2015 Framework

April 7, 2013 in MDG 4 (Child Mortality), MDG 5 (Maternal Health), MDG 6 (Health)

MDGs

Today is World Health Day, which marks the founding of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1948. The Millennium Development Goals have tackled health issues in the past, and the post-2015 agenda is shaping up to tackle them in the future.The first set of MDGs contained a number of goals aimed at improving health that can be divided into three categories:

1. Demographic goals: These were concerned with improving the health of certain populations.For example, the health of pregnant women and young children in Goals 4 and 5 (Child Mortality and Maternal Health, respectively).

2. Disease specific goals: The first set of goals focused on “the big three:” HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB. Everything else pertaining to health concerns was put under the blanket term of “other diseases”.

3. Wider determinants of health: This includes things like how being lifted out of extreme poverty will improve your access to food and nutrition, and thus improve your health in general.

Overall, the achievement of these goals has been hit and miss. For example, the roll out of anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy in large parts of the world has reduced the number of people dying from HIV/AIDS. However, many people still cannot access the necessary drugs. Child mortality has reduced in some countries, but is still quite terrible in sub-Saharan Africa. You can read more about these issues here in the UN’s Development Report, and also in the independently produced and very excellent Global Health Watch 3.

Global Health Watch 3

However, many people felt this level of specificity focuses programmes and funding on a few specific populations and diseases, to the neglect of many others. This has given rise to specific campaign movements to have other diseases included in the global health agenda, such as the Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), and Global Mental Health. Not to mention the extreme need for drugs, hospitals and staff in many places in the world. All of these deserve international recognition and funding.

So how do you tackle a problem like health in the post-2015 framework?

Dividing health down into disease and demographic groups has distorted the funding landscape and left millions of people without access to healthcare . Health is a problem affecting a whole population and encompassing a spectrum of disease. If you try and cherry-pick what health issues to tackle, you will always leave someone out. It is no good being able to get ARVs for HIV and then dying of appendicitis. There are two themes that appear in the current post-2015 discussions:

1. Universal health coverage: At the most basic level, this is the principle that everyone, everywhere should be able to access healthcare when they need it. This is obviously quite complicated  and you can click here to find out more from the WHO. This has recently been highlighted by Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary General.

2. Prevention, the social determinants of health: Too many people become ill unnecessarily and much more must be done to prevent common diseases. This approach involves tackling the “causes of the causes of ill health.” For instance, the environment in which people are born, grow up, and die significantly impacts their health. This includes things like living conditions, economic development, wealth distribution, education, and more. This approach has been developed and championed by Michael Marmot, and you can read more about it here.

Both strategies need to be adopted in the post-2015 framework. The global health and international development community needs to work together to see how this can be achieved. This may prove difficult due to the vested interests of both the negotiators and the lobbyists, but remains an ethical imperative and one that young people should be advocating for.

Prevention is always better than cure, unless you are already sick.

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by Rebecca

HLP Communiques & Common Themes

April 5, 2013 in MDGs, United Nations, Youth

UN Headquarters

Photo Courtesy UN.org

The Youth Representatives in Bali created a fantastic Youth Communique that set out priorities and plans for future involvement. It is a brilliant document and shows how youth can speak clearly and coherently about global development.

The High Level Panel also produced a communique from Bali. It highlights four key areas discussed: partnerships, sustainability, implementation, and accountability.

Partnerships: They suggest that ”Enhanced and scaled up models of cooperation…” will be needed to achieve the next development framework. Global governance should be strengthened and avoid overlapping. Everyone from the UN, civil society, private sector, and local governments should all support the next framework cooperatively.

Sustainability: They say that environmental sustainability will be paramount to the future of development and suggest that each country should help in accordance with its level of capacity and responsibility.They call for changes in behavior for all countries in regards to this, as the world population will reach 9-10 billion by 2050.

Implementation: The means of implementation should prompt a more monitored, responsible, and efficient use of financial resources. Tax havens and illicit financial flows should be should closer regulated.

Accountability: Increased and more accurate data is needed to successfully monitor progress. They call for a ”data revolution.” Data should be broken down by sex, age, religion, and other variables to better understand what effect development is having and to whom.

Communiques and press statements were also released following the preceding HLP meetings, and can all be viewed here. Reading through all the official statements produced by the HLP, some common themes can be observed. Firstly, there is considerable focus and attention paid to sustainability and ensuring the next development framework takes climate change and environmental concerns into serious account.

The multiple memos also call for increased partnership and cooperation among governments, particularly to fight financial corruption. This is likely due in response in part to the criticism Goal 8 of the MDGs has received as not being coherent enough or truly enforceable.

The reports also highlights consultations with multistakeholders, such as youth, women, and civil society. There certainly has been more inclusion and involvement than in the production of the MDGs, but it remains to be seen whether this will be reflected in the coming report and framework. It is also very debatable if there has been enough involvement with various stakeholders, particularly youth.

The panel is now in the process of producing a report that will have recommendations for Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. It is expected that this report should be completed by the end of May 2013. But the process is far from being over and the next development agenda is not even close to being complete.

We still have time to have our say and make sure global youth are accounted for in the coming framework. With all the communiques in mind, what do you think the HLP has done well? Do you think their chosen priorities are fair and inclusive? Most importantly, what have they failed to include and how can we ensure the youth voice continues to be listened to? Let us know in the comments below, on our Facebook page, or send us a Tweet!

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by Sarah

Busy Bees, Beavers and Butterflies in Bali

April 2, 2013 in MDGs, United Nations, Youth

Bali Post-2015 Youth Strategy Workshop Group

Bali Post-2015 Youth Strategy Workshop Group

Can young people really influence international development? Well, the 100 youths who assembled in Bali this week certainly think so. There is nothing special about us: we are just the lucky few selected from more than 1000 applicants to participate in the Bali Youth Stakeholder meeting here in Bali. We represent more than 30 nations across all continents (except Antarctica), and we worked hard to ensure decision-makers not just heard our voices, but listened to our suggestions and acted upon them.

So what did we actually do? Well, at 8am on Sunday morning we gathered in an Indonesian conference room full of passion, ideas and enthusiasm. We were ready to apply ourselves to the daunting, but exciting, task ahead. Most of us knew none of our fellow participants at the beginning, and for some people this was their first trip outside their home country. The youngest of us was 17, and the eldest 29. To be perfectly honest, I had little idea what to expect, but within minutes of talking to fellow participants my confidence grew and I realised we were in for an exciting few days.

Sunday’s workshop was led mainly by the wonderful Rachel and Iman of Indonesia Future Leaders. In order to prepare to engage with High Level Panelists the next day, we participated in group discussions about youth perspectives on the 2 main topics on Bali High Level Panel agenda: ‘Global Partnerships’ and ‘Means of implementation.’  We also examined the core themes arising from international youth consultations.

We received a visit from one of the High Level Panel members, Amina Mohamed (who is also special advisor to the UN Secretary General on post-2015). She was very friendly, and told us:

“Push the boundaries, give us a hard time, and you’ll get what you want.”

We heeded her suggestion, and stayed up very late to drafting the youth communique ready for the next day.

4th HLPEP on Post-2015 Agenda Youth Sector Group

Bali Youth Representatives

Monday was the big day for all of us. We took the bus to the plushest hotel in Bali, passed through security, and gasped at the size of the venue (the main room has a capacity of 1500 people!), before settling into our seats for the morning session of the High Level Panel’s outreach day. It began with a ‘Townhall Meeting’. During this open session, various representatives of civil society made presentations to the HLP, followed by a short time for Q&A. Many interesting points were raised, for example, one CSO presenter said:

“No target should be considered to have been met if children, young people, women and marginalised groups continue to be excluded from development”

…but I found the format a bit repetitive and dry, on the whole. I think all of us were glad when the afternoon finally arrived, and we had our chance to interact directly with members of the High Level Panel. We welcomed 6 high level panelists to participate in a series of youth-facilitated round-table discussions, following 5 short and punchy presentations on:

  1. The road to Bali (presentation on outcomes of youth participation in London and Monrovia)
  2. Global partnerships
  3. Means of implementation
  4. Monitoring and accountability
  5. The road from Bali (presentation on future youth participation in post-2015 process)

I was lucky enough to co-facilitate (with Jaoa from ChangeMob) the round-table involving Homi Kharas, none other than the lead author of the HLP report to UN General Assembly! It was an unbelievable opportunity, and not one we wanted to mess up. Thankfully the discussion ran smoothly and productively. The presentations were excellently received by the panellists, and all the round-table discussions were rich. Mr Kharas summed up:

“I have heard something quite exciting at this table. Young people want to be agents of change, and are starting to organise themselves to do so…[...]. The HLP report is ultimately about how your lives can be made better. Don’t worry about whether or not we’re listening to youth – we are. But it is not just about your voices: it is also about your actions. What we really want to know is what young people themselves want to do for themselves, to contribute to development, and what real blockages you feel you face.”

The buzz in the room was brilliant, and I felt very proud to be part of such a process.

But it didn’t end there: even on Monday evening, many of us stayed on to participate in a fringe event run by Restless Development, about the role that young people can play in monitoring international development progress. 22-year-old Luciano of Brazil Youth Coalition gave a great presentation to a room filled with important people, including Justine Greening (UK Secretary of State for International Development). Paul Polman (the CEO of Unilever, and HLP representative of the private sector) observed:

“When you look back in time at those who have changed the course of history, you realise just how many of them are young people. It seems worth noting that change can so often be traced back to young people.”

Tuesday was another day filled with meetings – the morning I spent with the Beyond 2015 working group was fascinating, and reminded me just how many of us there are pushing for similar objectives. But my favourite day was Wednesday, when a team of young people came back together to strategize and plan our next steps for the post-2015 process. Some of us were bees (buzzing around getting involved in everything), some of us were beavers (diving into the detail of discussions), and some of us were butterflies (fluttering beautifully and attracting attention to important issues) – but the key message that I took away is that there is a role FOR EVERYONE when it comes to setting the post-2015 international development agenda.

So, if you want to be part of these activities, please do contact us here at Generation Development!

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