NATIONAL11 [ (Spotlight Weelky)]

Work For All

Nepalese youths begin to prepare their agenda for the upcoming youth employment summit

By SANJAYA DHAKAL

With the ambitious target of providing productive and sustainable livelihoods to an additional 500 million young adults, especially those facing poverty, by the year 2012, the Youth Employment Summit (YES) is going to launch a Decade Campaign of Action in 2002.

Youth: Untapped patential

The government of Egypt is going to host the YES 2002 in Alexandria in September next year with the support from a number of international NGOs and UN agencies.

With the objective of forming a task force to study and form Nepal's voice regarding youth employment, Nepal Volunteers Association and Youth Initiative organized an interaction program on December 16 in Kathmandu.

"This interaction marks the start of a number of programs that we will be organizing to arrive at a formal agenda we will be putting at the YES 2002," said Rajendra Mulmi, coordinator of the program. According to Mulmi, the first interaction was held only among the youth participants and it constituted a task force that would study the issue further.

After the YES 2002, there will be a decade long campaign. "If Nepal wants to be a part of the global campaign, it needs to work immediately. In fact, the Alexandria conference will be the start of the 10 years of plans of actions," said Cameron Neil, an Australian development activist associated with the YES 2002.

"We will be working together with all concerned agencies and come up with a formal agenda before the Global Youth Service Day in April," said Mulmi.

Already countries like Nepal, Tanzania, South Africa, Philippines, Romania, Egypt and Mexico are holding interaction programs in their countries to frame their agenda for the summit.

At present there are 1 billion young people between 15-24 years of age. And 850 million of them live in developing countries while 153 million of them are illiterate. About 16 million of them (10-24 years of age) are infected with AIDS.

Large number of youths remain unemployed in developing countries. "In Nepal, we don't have a concrete figure on how many of our youths are unemployed. We need to study on these figures, too," said Mulmi.

As the issue of unemployment among youths are closely linked with other issues like health and social harmony, it is an important challenge that needs to be overcome as soon as possible.