What is YLD?

YLD often provides a young person’s first experience of designing and implementing a social or commercial enterprise in their community.

Origins

The phrase ‘youth-led development’ was first heard at the World Youth Congress in Hawai’i in October 1999.

Delegates to that Congress said very clearly to the organisers:

“Education is our top priority but, once educated we want to be trained, enabled – and funded – to take action to address the challenges faced by our generation through sustainable youth-led development.

We want, in Gandhi’s words, to ‘be the change’ we want to see in the world…”

This remarkable statement led Peace Child to set up the ‘Be the Change’ (BTC), youth-led sustainable development action fund to pursue the 10 priority goals agreed by the delegates.

Eight of the goals prioritised by the delegates actually mirrored the eight Millennium Development Goals agreed by UN Member States at the UN Millennium Summit in New York in September 2000.

Growth

Young people themselves proved the value of YLD by coming up with literally thousands of brilliant initiatives of which, sadly, the Peace Child BTC programme could only fund a handful. Celebrities like Ryan Hreljacic and Craig Kielburger – setting up Ryan’s Well and Free the Children respectively – pointed the potential of the field, while courageous young people from the South – like Florence Wanjuku in Kenya and Djamila Ousmane from Niger convinced everyone in PCI, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that young people could make poverty history if they were given a chance.

The UN agencies have provided exceptional leadership in the field of YLD. By encouraging youth participation in development in the World Programme of Action for Youth, the UN Programme for Youth has carried a torch for YLD which other UN Agencies have followed. UNIDO and ILO have led on the development of a Youth Job Creation programme for four of the world’s least-developed countries in West Africa. UN-Habitat has now set up a Youth Opportunities Fund to promote Youth-led Development in the World’s cities.

Civil society agencies have also been in the vanguard of the rapid development of YLD: the Prince’s Trust – and its international arm – Prince’s Youth Business International – have been doing YLD for years, supporting and funding young people, living at disadvantage to start and run small businesses. The International Youth Foundation has business incubator programmes, and job training / lifeskills programmes in several countries. SPARK has set up youth Business Incubators all over the Balkans with the support of the Dutch government; Plan International has a youth fund for the young people of the regions in which they are working – and the Commonwealth Youth Programme, and the Commonwealth Youth Credit Initiative have been advancing funds to youth for years – with the support of the British Government. Ashoka Youth Venture, and Free the Children.

The Future

The logic of investing in YLD seems to us to be inescapable. But, it is a logic that has escaped the leadership of the world’s major development agencies.

Twice a year, since our first congress, we have written to them - updating them on the fantastic evidence we have accumulated to prove the effectiveness of YLD.

Every time, we have urged them to indicate who, in their department, deals with the YLD sector. Only 5 of the 27 members of the OECD Development Committee have identified an officer with responsibility for that 60-70% of the populations of their client states who are under 25.

Youth – as a sector – simply are not on their radar.

Hopefully that will change: increasingly governments of the least-developed countries recognise both the problem – and the potential – of the current youth bulge in population. Hopefully, the next ten years will see them persuading donor nations to take youth seriously and move towards investing in youth as a sector.

The next step for the organisers of the World Youth Congress is to complete a mapping/benchmark study of the work that each of the major Development Agencies is doing with youth. We plan for this study to be done ahead of the next World Youth Congress in Istanbul in 2010 - so that we have a foundation of knowledge and experience on which to build future strategies for YLD.