Daniel Semere
There is an ever increasing need and a wide support for youth engagement in all communities nowadays. Youth engagement is advocated on the conviction that youth have assets and are therefore capable of making meaningful contributions to their communities. While it is important to examine outcomes related to youth engagement, it is equally important to determine successful practices to understand how such outcomes can be achieved. Effective youth engagement requires a ceaseless investment on developing the youth to capacitate any community to achieve its short and long-term goals. And this requires a coordinated effort at a community, national, and international level.
Youth development is the ongoing growth process in which all youth are engaged in order to meet their basic personal and social needs. It also involves building skills and competencies that allow them to function and contribute in their daily lives. This definition describes youth development as a process that all young people go through. As the definition implies, it is a process that automatically involves all of the people around the youth, which mean family, youth organizations, government and international community as a whole. A young person will not be able to build essential skills and competencies unless these bodies provide them with the supports and opportunities they need along the way. Thus, youth development is also a process in which these bodies must actively participate so that the end product will be the ideal youth we all want to build and develop.
In Eritrea youth development involves people, places, supports, opportunities and services that most of us inherently understand that young people need to be healthy and successful. There are many efforts to define the outcomes of youth development, and most express the results that we want for our youth. However, people, programs and institutions should involve in a coordinated manner in youth development toward positive results in the lives of our youth. Some like the National Union of Eritrean Youth and students (NUEYS) have clearly defined these desired positive results or outcomes in an attempt to more effectively work toward the youth. The union has identified those outcomes to be comprehensive as to include the physical, mental, and intellectual health of our youth with the intention of securing their employability and involvement in the civic and social affairs of the nation. It also acknowledges the need to engage with regional and international youth organization in trying to address this issue. Towards this end, the first task is of course identifying and meeting the challenges we face.
Most of the problems challenging our youth have a global nature. Needless to say, we are living in a world where interdependence is not a choice any more. No country can make it in its own with out a proper interaction with the rest of the world. As such, most of the challenges we face as an individual nation are also interdependent and the solution needs a concerted and coordinated effort as a global community. The challenges youth globally are facing are of such nature.
A young person today has many reasons to be grateful: greater contact with the rest of the world, more educational opportunities, and a longer life than previous generation. On the other hand however, youth worldwide are facing growing levels of unemployment, poverty, armed conflict, epidemic diseases, illiteracy and substance abuse – among other social and economic challenges -despite global advances made in technologies, entrepreneurship development, medical research, and leisure and recreation facilities. This typifies the experience of a young person growing up in a developed country, and is increasingly the experience of many young people growing up in developing countries as well. But these experiences are not universal and youth living in certain nation or part of the world are undoubtedly facing a much stronger challenge. Addressing the challenges of the global youth should therefore have the needs of these youth at the center of the effort to overcome. Coordination here becomes indispensable.
Both young women and young men today benefit from a global and coordinated effort to improve the well being of the world’s poor through the Millennium Development Goals, a framework for poverty reduction forged by world leaders in 2000. Six of the eight Millennium goals address issues raised here: reducing poverty, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases. While not all the goals are likely to be reached by the year 2015, and although the goals are not aimed only at youth, they do promise better lives for today’s youth if and when they are attained. Accordingly, youth organizations, governments, and international organizations should seek to work with a broad range of the youth population, both those organized through formal youth organizations and those who are not. Cooperation and exchanges should be used to develop the capacity of young people by facilitating the interchange of information among them. Working together in various areas of quality services can and should also be an effective part of such coordination. In fact no development can be complete without services in such areas as education, health, and employment, which should incorporate relevant instruction, and information in our social and national priorities. These services should also create challenging opportunities for the youth to express themselves, to contribute, to take on new roles, and be part of a larger group so as to direct and merge our effort toward the aforementioned priorities.
Youth development is about people, programs, institutions and systems that provide youth with the supports and opportunities they need to empower themselves. This requires youth development at all levels to be vigorously and tirelessly pursued so that it will endure and become a global culture. And in the end these effort toward youth development, all the supports and opportunities, could only be meaningful and have the impact we desire as long as and only when all youth can be able to take advantage of it. In many societies the ultimate challenge is to make such supports and opportunities the rule rather than the exception for all youth.
The National Union of Eritrean Youth and Student (NUEYS) as a representative and agent of youth, has been playing an enormous part in this huge task and has been doing a great effort in various ways. But it also understands the need to learn from other’s experience and work in partnership with different regional and international organizations. There is no doubt that the NUEYS has been and can play a crucial role in coordinating the hard work made toward the youth nationally but it is only the engagement with the rest of the world that will ultimately have a decisive contribution in its task of building a healthy youth. And the International Youth Forum NUEYS is hosting is another step ahead in this task.
