On the 8th of October 2013, UN-HABITAT in collaboration with Habitat Norway will host the seminar: “Youth and Urban Governance, including Land and ICT” at The House of Literature in Oslo. UN-HABITAT will also launch a report on the topic the same day. Already several months in advance, we have the honor of publishing an article on this topic, written by the Youth and Livelihood Unit of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT).
Youth are society’s most essential and dynamic human resource. There are more people under the age of 25 today than ever, totalling nearly three billion or almost half of the total global population; 1.3 billion of that total are between the age of 12 and 24. It is important to encourage youth participation in development and governance. The Urban Youth Fund of the UN-Habitat gives youth from developing countries the opportunity to become agents of change. If given the possibility and right tools, youth are showing great ability and innovation, such as the use of entrepreneurial and ICT. Projects led by youth do not only give economic benefits, but brings also positive results on the social level, such as gender equality, youth crime, youth participation in governance. For a sustainable development of cities, it is very important to include youth participation in development and governance.
UN-Habitat and Youth
Urbanization is the engine that propels the world towards prosperity in the 21 st century and youth are the engineers. These youth live, by and large, in cities and towns; the cities of the developing world account for over 90% of the world’s urban growth and youth account for a large percentage of those inhabitants. It is estimated that as many as 60% of all urban dwellers will be under the age of 18 by 2030. In the developing regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the increase in youth population is expected to be more important than that in developed countries. Developing cities increasingly attract youth from rural or lesser developed areas, as they seek better livelihood opportunities.
Most developing countries are not prepared for the rapid urbanization process because they lack the adequate infrastructures, do not necessarily have planned urban policies and are not supported by stable institutions. In the process of urbanization, youth are often amongst those who are most impacted upon. Natural population growth and increased migration from rural to urban areas result in a number of social and economic issues. Unequal opportunities, unemployment and underemployment issues arise for the youth in living in cities and the disparities are even wider for those living in slums and informal settlements.
Because youth represents such a large segment of the world’s population, it is important to have development programmes which specifically involve and target youth. Youth-led development should be encouraged and youth should become more aware of their potential as agents of change. As such, UN- Habitat developed its youth programme to promote and support youth participation and action in improving their socio-economic conditions.
The Urban Youth Fund
The UN-Habitat Urban Youth Fund was launched at the World Urban Forum in 2008, in Nanjing, China. It is aimed at supporting innovative youth-led initiatives in developing countries around the world through the provision of grants of up to 25,000USD. Since 2009 and up to 2012, the Urban Youth Fund has supported 212 youth groups around the world for a total of 3.4 million USD.
The Fund focuses on urban youth and more particularly on youth from marginalized urban areas. UN-Habitat has set a number of criteria pertaining to youth participation in organizational and managerial activities, gender equity, project uniqueness and innovation amongst others to ensure that youth are the ones implementing and benefitting from the initiatives.
The call for applications to the global Urban Youth Fund is yearly, and projects around the globe are funded for a period of one year maximum. Every year, the call for applications triggers between 5000 to 8000 youth organizations to apply for the Youth Fund. An average of 50 projects get funding yearly, based on the financial capacity of the Fund.
Tackling Youth Employment Challenges through Entrepreneurship
In the next decade, 500 million youth will enter the workforce. Today, 66 million youth are unemployed and an even higher number are underemployed. The unemployment rate for youth is two to three times higher than for adults. A generation without the hope of a stable job is a burden for the whole of society. Poor employment in the early stages of a young person’s career can harm job prospects for life. This is true for youth in both developed and developing countries. These reasons for why the Urban Youth Fund is focusing on projects related to on entrepreneurship and social enterprises.
The analysis of youth projects supported by the Youth Fund, focusing on entrepreneurship, highlighted the importance of giving youth access to financial services to start their own enterprises. Youth enterprises do not solely focus on the economic benefits from the projects, but as well the social benefits. The economic benefits were often used to address one or more social issues faced by the youth, such as women empowerment, awareness and sensitizing health campaigns, allowing access to basic urban services, the environment, etc. Youth demonstrated an ability to address social issues with an entrepreneurial approach, and in doing so, tackle both the youth employment issue as well as social matters.
Young social entrepreneurs play an important role as change agents. Their projects, while providing job opportunities and improving incomes of benefitting parties, create and sustain social value and impact on the community at large. They engage in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation and learning. Youth social entrepreneurs provide alternative and innovative solutions to the youth employment problem as well as valuable goods and services to society and the community at large.
Adopting Technology to meet Youth’s Needs
ICT in the hands of youth is a rapidly evolving tool; youth show great inventiveness in adapting technological devices to meet their needs. UN-Habitat acknowledges the importance of accessing and creating opportunities through digital technology.
A number of projects which received grants from the Urban Youth Fund focused on providing access to ICT to their young beneficiaries for various empowerment purposes. Youth have been using ICT as a means to bridge the digital divide but also as a means of finding, creating and widening economic opportunities. In developing countries, youth have shown a shrewd ability to use technological tools to their advantage, from opening outsourcing centres to media centres to promote writing and reporting to training youth to make them more employable. Through the creation of discussion forums and platforms, youth were given the ability and opportunity to link up with others to interactively discuss issues they face.
ICT, and most often social media, has also been used as a means to promote and increase youth participation in various governance issues. Through social media tools and platforms, youth are empowered to express themselves and to get together digitally even over the wide distances which may separate them. As a networking tool, ICT and social media have allowed youth to access information on devlopment issues both locally and internationally and to find the way forward for these issues. Moreover, digital media has proved to be an important asset in youth development as youth seek to increase awareness on various youth matters such as human rights, women’s empowerment, urban planning, and risk reduction.
The Way Forward
There is no one solution to tackling the issues faced by youth. At UN-Habitat, we believe that the best way to promote youth-led development is by giving youth the opportunity to be agents of change. Youth need to be at the locus of the changes they want to bring about, and the success of the Urban Youth Fund lies in the wide variety of projects that youth bring forward and implement. The Urban Youth Fund does not seek to focus on only one issue face by youth, but rather, it encompasses a whole range of issues and gives youth the financial and technical means to serve their peers and the community as a whole.
If today’s youth population is the biggest ever in history, it is crucial to build on the capacity of this youthful human resource today to contribute to a better tomorrow. It is time to rely on youth as strengths and assets and positively engage them in being agents of change by encouraging their initiatives and letting them be the ones instigating change and not the ones being only the receptors of change.
