GENEVA - Youth leaders, senior YEN officials of the ILO, the UN, and the World Bank, and other organizations met at the ILO on 30 June-1 July for the second meeting of the High Level Panel of the Youth Employment Network, to chart a "road map" for action at the country level.
The High Level Panel called upon the core partner agencies to implement specific steps to meet the challenge of youth employment. These include translating strategy into National Action Plans (NAPs), mobilizing financial resources for youth employment, brokering social dialogue, inviting youth organizations to play an active role in the design and implementation of national action plans, and engaging business representatives and workers in outreach programmes and collaboration with young people.
"Our challenge now is to move from the excellent policy work that has been done to a new phase of action at the country level", said UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who congratulated the High Level Panel on its progress and recommendations.
"Investing in decent and productive work for young people is both a strategy for economic and social development and our quest for national and collective security. We have seen, all too often, the tragedy of youthful lives miss-spent in crime, drug abuse, civil conflict and even terrorism." – Kofi Annan
Convened in the wake of the 2000 Millennium Summit, the YEN aims to "develop and implement strategies that give young people everywhere a real chance to find decent and productive work", through key policy interventions, employability, equal opportunities, entrepreneurship and employment creation.
"Investing in decent and productive work for young people is both a strategy for economic and social development and our quest for national and collective security. We have seen, all too often, the tragedy of youthful lives miss-spent in crime, drug abuse, civil conflict and even terrorism." – Kofi Annan
Youth are the solution, not the problem
The Secretary-General welcomed the active role of youth organizations in the discussion, noting that young people provided unique expertise and approaches. "When we want to know about Youth, you are the experts." He added that the road map could provide countries with a unique resource for the creation and implementation of national action plans.
In response, youth representatives pledged an "enhanced collaborative voice" to the youth employment agenda. They proposed greater recognition for countries making progress on the issue of youth employment, and a coordinating mechanism between the YEN and its youth constituents.
Geeta Rao Gupta, President of the International Centre for Research on Women and chair of the meeting, said that the YEN had agreed to help countries develop and implement plans to increase youth employment. It welcomed ILO leadership in helping YEN recruit other governments and develop criteria for prospective partners. Participants also stressed the need for the collection and dissemination of information on good practises in youth employment.
National action in Indonesia
JAKARTA – An Indonesian Youth Employment Network (I-YEN) was launched on 12 August, International Youth Day, aimed at providing jobs for the country's 6.1 million unemployed young people. Under the Youth Employment Network (YEN), Indonesia has become a lead country in the development of National Youth Employment Action Plans (NAPs) and is uniting government ministries, private companies and NGOs to mobilize technical and financial resources. The World Bank and UNDP are also working in partnership with the Ministry of Education to target the special needs of marginalized youth. The ILO is supporting the network's activities by conducting school-to-work transition surveys, developing vocational training policy guidelines, providing support to young workers in the informal sector, and developing a national youth employment website.