Sustainable Development
Youth in Policy
As young people, we often feel that we cannot contribute to policy processes. While it is extremely difficult, there are some successful examples of young people getting heard. The report "Youth and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - Challenges and Opportunities for Implementation" is one of them.
If you want to learn more about the content of the report and how it came about - then read on!
The Millenium Project and Youth
In 2002 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan invited a large group of development experts to form the Millennium Project . Headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a well-known economist at Columbia University in New York, the Millennium Project set out to create a concrete action plan for how the MDGs can be achieved. On January 17, 2005, the Millennium Project Report was released, and it concluded that it is possible to achieve the MDGs by 2015, but not if we continue on today's path. The report outlined a number of steps the world needs to take if we are serious about our ambition to end poverty and human suffering.
Young people have a special interest in seeing the recommendations of the report transformed into real action. In 2015 many of us will be adults with families and children, and the actions of the world leaders in the next couple of years will do much to determine how the world will look in 10 years. So, how can we as young people get involved with the MDGs? A group of young people has tried to answer that question, after being challenged to do so by Professor Sachs.
How it all began
In April 2004 the UN Commission on Sustainable Development held its annual meeting at the UN Headquarter in New York . The Commission meets to review the progress towards sustainable development and then to make recommendations on how we can make that progress better and quicker. It consists of politicians and government officials from member countries of the UN, and members of civil society are invited to join the discussions. A group of dedicated youth from around the world has formed a Youth Caucus through which they participate in the annual Commission meetings in order to ensure that the voices of young people would be heard. During the Commission, Professor Sachs attended a meeting on the MDGs. The Chair of the Youth Caucus asked him how the Millennium Project was going to involve young people as partners. He replied: You tell us.
Taking on the challenge by Professor Sachs, an international team of youth experts from all over the world formed a working group and decided to write a paper on how young people can get involved with the MDGs. The members, all young people, spent hours researching and consulting with other organizations. In order to ensure a broad representation, a 3-week online consultation with over 350 youth from around the world was held. These efforts, in addition to input based on the experience and expertise of the writers, resulted in the report called "Youth and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): Challenges and Opportunities for Implementation."
The Youth and MDG Paper
The report consists of three parts. The first part outlines how youth are already involved in decision-making processes in government bodies and civil society organizations. The level of participation ranges from effective to non-existent. The second part goes into detail on each Goal and describes how young people are affected by the Goal, how young people are already contributing to the Goal, and what can be done to increase youth participation in achieving the Goal. For each Goal there are several "Options for Action" concrete suggestions for how national and international institutions can get more young people involved. The third and final part of the report contains general recommendations and focuses on how young people can get involved with the Goals through raising awareness, taking part in policy decisions, taking action, and networking and collaborating. Overall, the report is a call out to governments and institutions to get more youth involved with the Goals.
The report was initially released in November 2004, and the working group encouraged everyone to provide comments and feedback. During the space of 4 months, the report was downloaded more than 24,000 times! After all the feedback and comments had been considered, the finalized version of the report was written. The official release took place at the Commission on Sustainable Development on April 19, 2005, one year after the challenge from Professor Sachs.The report will be used as a lobbying tool in upcoming conferences and summits on the MDGs, but most of all, the report aims to serve as a starting point for greater discussion on how young people can get involved with the MDGs.
About the Goals
Development is about freedom from misery and suffering, form hunger, from illiteracy, from disease, from poor housing and insecurity. Many inequalities in the world are in need of our recognition, time, and commitment to action. The Millennium Development Goals are a plan that, if implemented, could just be the greatest achievement of responsible development.
At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, 189 Heads of State and Governments pledged to work together to make a better world for all by 2015. On behalf of their people, they signed the Millennium Declaration which promises to free men, women and children from the dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty and make the right to development a reality for everyone. Eight Millennium Development Goals were adopted, committing rich and poor countries to work together in a global partnership to eradicate extreme poverty by 2015. Each Goal has been designed so that it is easy to understand, easy to implement and easy to measure.
Making the Connection
It is the primary responsibility of poor countries to achieve the first seven Goals. Goals 1 through 7 commit them to raise the poor out of poverty and hunger, ensure that all boys and girls complete primary school, promote gender equality, improve the health of mothers and children, reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, and protect the environment. Developing countries must do more to integrate the Goals into their policies, plans and budgets and translate them into services and benefits for the poor. There is a need for more transparency and accountability so people can follow whether their governments are taking the right steps to move forward.But poor countries can not achieve the first seven Goals unless rich countries fulfill their responsibilities outlined in Goal 8. The developed countries need to give more aid and make sure that what they give is used more effectively. They also need to offer more sustainable debt relief and increase trade opportunities for poor countries by reducing tariffs and subsidies to agriculture which deny poor country farmers their best chance to earn a decent living. Achieving all the Goals should always be the focus because none can truly be realized without the others.
HIV/AIDS AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS
HIV/AIDS continued to pose an acute threat to children's human rights in general. Unlike many virulent epidemics in history that have killed mainly young children and the elderly, AIDS for the most part infects and kills adults aged eighteen to forty years, in or near the most productive years of their lives. Globally, most persons in this age group are parents. Thus, for children, the epidemic too often represents both the loss of a parent or parents and exposure to the stigma and discrimination that go hand in hand with AIDS throughout the world.
In heavily affected countries, for each child who had lost a parent to AIDS, one or two school-age children were likely to be caring for an ill parent, acting as breadwinners for the household, or otherwise unable to attend school because of AIDS. Children who were not orphaned were also affected when orphans were brought into their homes or when they themselves were infected with HIV. Thus, AIDS-affected children comprised a much larger population than just orphans.
In sub-Saharan Africa--the most heavily AIDS-affected region of the world--AIDS orphaned children at a rate unprecedented in history. The United Nations conservatively estimated that by December 2000, about 13 million children under age fifteen in sub-Saharan Africa had lost their mother or both parents to AIDS. In July 2000, the United States Bureau of the Census, which keeps data on AIDS independent of the United Nations, estimated that there were about 15 million children under age fifteen who had lost at least one parent to AIDS in Africa and that by 2010 this number would be at least 28 million, including over 30 percent of all children under age fifteen in five countries of eastern and southern Africa. The percentage of the child population represented by orphans will remain very high in some African countries for decades, according to the Census Bureau.
AIDS's impact on children was felt far beyond Africa as the epidemic's devastation spread to other regions of the world. In Thailand, the estimated 300,000 deaths from AIDS since the beginning of the epidemic have resulted in many orphans, of which a large percentage are thought to be in the care of a grandparent or other relative. The most rapid spread of HIV/AIDS was experienced in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states, where widespread use of injected drugs drove the epidemic. Children were affected both as they were drawn into drug use at a young age and as they lost their parents. Globally, access to services such as syringe exchange or simple materials for syringe sterilization, which would reduce the likelihood of HIV transmission, was limited, partly due to the stigmatization of drug users and their families. Numbers of children orphaned and otherwise made vulnerable by AIDS also grew rapidly in the heavily affected countries of the Caribbean basin.
But African children saw the worst of it. The United Nations estimated in December 2000 that 92 percent of children orphaned by AIDS were in sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS ate away at communities already wracked by poverty, war, and corruption. In the African countries hardest hit by HIV/AIDS, the extended family was traditionally the source of support and care for orphans and other children needing special protection. In the face of enormous numbers of children without parental care, the extended family became increasingly overextended, if not completely unraveled, and unable to provide its traditional level of protection and support. The pattern was all too commonly seen: a parent became ill, the loss of his or her labor in the household or income generated outside the household and increased medical expenses impoverished the family, and school fees became unaffordable. Children were withdrawn from school and required to care for sick household members and young children, engaged in income-generating activities, or some combination of these.
Unskilled children who had to become the family breadwinners were particularly vulnerable to exploitation and being forced into the worst forms of child labor, a situation greatly exacerbated by the stigma of AIDS. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported in July 2001 that AIDS was pushing large numbers of children into hazardous labor in Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Lesotho, and South Africa. An investigation of the experience of one hundred children orphaned by AIDS in South Africa, summarized in a June 2001 report by the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, found widespread hunger and other deprivation among these children and a number of girls as young as eight being forced to engage in prostitution to survive. Other research in Africa in 2000 and 2001 attributed the large rise in the number of street children in countries such as Zambia and Kenya to HIV/AIDS.
Loss of inheritance rights was another common problem of children orphaned by AIDS, as documented by Human Rights Watch's investigation of the problem in Kenya in a report released in June 2001. AIDS orphaned over a million children in Kenya by the end of 2000 and affected many more in other ways. A large percentage of the children interviewed by Human Rights Watch experienced the unlawful appropriation of property, usually by distant relatives, that the children were entitled to inherit. NGO reports suggested that thousands of children in the country have had this experience. Property-grabbing from children on a large scale is a relatively recent phenomenon in the country, related again both to AIDS and to the deterioration of the extended family. Human Rights Watch concluded that the existing institutions of the judicial system in Kenya did not allow for adequate consideration of property cases of children and recommended that the government establish a streamlined, user-friendly mechanism for civil court hearings of these cases.
One of the most frequent AIDS-related rights violations suffered by children worldwide was that of their right to information on HIV/AIDS, a matter of life and death for children where the epidemic has a foothold. While most government HIV/AIDS programs in Africa have focused on information in some form, a number of reports released in 2001 showed young people to have poor access to appropriate information across Africa. This problem was compounded by the effect of AIDS on school enrollment, but even for children able to stay in school, appropriate AIDS information--particularly in the later primary school years, where it was arguably most needed--is absent from too many government curricula. In Kenya, for example, resistance by Roman Catholic leaders to education on sex and reproductive health impeded the development of an AIDS curriculum for primary and secondary schools until 2000 and continued to handicap its full implementation in 2001.
The U.N. General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS in June agreed that all countries should work toward implementation by 2005 of comprehensive national programs to protect and support children affected by AIDS, including "providing appropriate counseling and psychosocial support, ensuring their enrolment in school and access to shelter . . . and protect[ing] orphans and vulnerable children from all forms of abuse, violence, exploitation, discrimination, trafficking and loss of inheritance." The emergency already faced by children affected by AIDS urgently demanded a comprehensive response.
Edit a custom page for your Web site:
Edit a custom page for your Web site:
Edit a custom page for your Web site:
