An Economic Analyst at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Ms Sylvia Sefakor Senu, has said the youth have a huge role to play in raising awareness of the issues relating to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“We have gone past the time we think the youth are not capable of doing certain things. They are a very creative and innovative group of people that can make things work,” she said.
Ms Senu said this last Saturday at the Accra Global People’s Hub which was held simultaneously with the Global People’s Summit of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York.
The event was hosted by the Foundation for Generational Thinkers (FOGET), a Ghanaian trans-generational non-governmental organisation (NGO), which was enlisted as the official organisation to hold the 2018 Edition of the summit which was on the theme: ‘Reimagine Humanity: Inspire The Future.’
The Accra Global People’s Hub was streamed live on facebook. There was also a live interactive session with the Global People’s Summit in New York via online.
Summit
The Global People’s Summit was a day-long, innovative global event that brought together impact-driven individuals from around the world online to explore, understand, design and co-create solutions to the most pressing challenges.
The summit is organised in partnership with the UN Office of Partnerships and takes place during the UN General Assembly. The event engages diverse stakeholders, senior government officials, the diplomatic corps, lead global development and humanitarian institutions, among others, in a conversation on how the world could be made a better place.
Ideas
Ms Senu said the youth had lots of ideas and so using them to create awareness and highlight the issues on the SGDs would go a long way to reach many people, especially those of their age group and the younger generation.
“If we want to do things in a different way to achieve different results, we don’t have to look anywhere but to look to our youth. They have fresh ideas and are very innovative in their thinking. I think we have a huge potential in them to achieve the SDGs, just based on their exuberance and appetite to make things change,” she said.
She said in all the areas of the SDGs the youth had a critical role to play, and cited the goal on sanitation, for instance, which was key to the health of people.
“The youth are using technology which can be used to get feedback,” she added.
FOGET
For his part, the President of FOGET, Mr Prosper Dan Afetsi, described the Accra Global People’s Hub event as highly successful, especially with the live interactive session with the event which was held in New York.
“The Accra Global Hub sought to localise the conversation of the UN General Assembly. They give a seat to everybody to participate to join the conversation online to let the world know what they are going through and provide possible solutions on how our leaders can tackle some of the challenges, among other things,” he said.
He said the conversations were about the SDGs and how all countries could attain them by 2030.
“We decided to contribute in the areas that we are functioning. For FOGET, we are more into education and sanitation; goals four and six of the SDGs. It is through those angles that we pushed our conversations to the world,” he said.
