Presentation on ‘Switched On – Youth at the Heart of Sustainable Development In Asia and the Pacific’
My task today is to tell you about the report, ‘Switched On,’ which is a collective effort of 13 UN agencies working on a broad range of development issues with the support of ADB. It’s a report that analyzes through the lens of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the current state of youth in the Asia Pacific Region and how to ensure a better present and future for you and for the people of the region in general.
We’ve called it ‘Switched On’ because we need the young people of the region to be fully ‘switched on’ -- your capacities as human beings, as citizens and as leaders fully developed and activated, and your hearts and intellects fully engaged in changing our region for the better.
Before I get into the content of the report, let me touch on the 2030 Agenda and why it’s important. I have been working in the UN System now for over thirty years, so I am not easily impressed by grand new initiatives coming out of the UN. But I really do think that this is an unprecedented global agreement to make development work for all people – not just some, and also for our planet and other forms of life that share it with us.
It’s an agenda that seeks to bring together all aspects of life – the economic, the social, the environmental, and also how we are governed and how we live together as societies. It brings together all of this under what we call the ‘Five P’s’: People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, Partnership. It’s an agenda that proposes to build a better world for all people, leaving no one behind. That means correcting the inequalities left by the MDG process, based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which tells us that we are all born free and equal in dignity and rights.
The 2030 Agenda very much emphasizes the idea of ‘transformation’ that is, a different vision of what constitutes a good life, as not being just about material wellbeing but about caring – people and countries caring for one another and also for nature – and about fairness and justice for everyone.
Young people were very much a part of the shaping of the agenda. There was very broad participation in the SDGs debate, not only by governments but by people of diverse parts of societies and age groups, including consultations specifically with young people. In fact in a global survey done as part of the lead-up to the 2030 Agenda, young people in Asia identified education, an honest and responsive government and good health care as the three top priorities. In all, over five million people contributed to the debate, whether in face to face dialogue or by virtual means.
This really was an unprecedented effort to democratize the debate on the global development agenda. And even though the 2030 Agenda is still only a promise, it’s truly significant that 193 countries signed on to it willingly. In that sense this agenda shows us one of the main reasons why the United Nations is important – as a space for countries to come together, no matter what their differences, and through often long and complicated negotiations, agree on a better path for the world. The important thing is that these agreements are achieved through dialogue, without coercion.
Because of this participatory process, there is more commitment and public expectation and pressure to truly move forward on this agenda. We need to seize this opportunity.
And we need you to do that, one, because you are such a big and important part of the better world we are trying to build – 750 million young persons in the Asia and Pacific Region. That’s about a fifth of the total population. And if we are going to change the way we think about and work on development like the 2030 Agenda is calling on us to do, we cannot do that without your capacity to imagine a different world, and the faith and energy you’re capable of to turn that vision into reality.
The 'Switched On' report looks at the state of youth across Asia and the Pacific, with recommendations for a better future.
Now let me give you a summary of the report. It is organized under the Five P’s of the 2030 agenda. So let’s start with ‘People,’ which has to do with ending poverty and hunger and promoting food security, health and well-being. Our region has had a lot of success in reducing extreme poverty -- from 52 to 18% since 1990. Yet nearly 100 million young people are still living in extreme poverty, facing great difficulties in exercising their right to quality education and health services as well as decent work. Their access to food and nutrition is precarious and those engaged in small holder agriculture get little support. Many young people choose to migrate from the countryside to the cities in search of better opportunities. Adolescents are especially vulnerable to HIV and sexually transmitted diseases and to drug abuse and violence. Girls in particular face a high risk of unwanted pregnancies.
The report urges better and stronger public policies to address these issues, including well-coordinated poverty eradication programmes, more support to small holder agriculture, youth-friendly health services and better support to migrant youth.
‘Planet’ has to do with protection of the environment and combatting climate change. Climate change is already causing rising sea levels and extreme weather events, hitting the poor and the marginalized harder, and thereby worsening inequalities. Asia and the Pacific is the world’s most disaster prone region. Massive rural-urban migration and unplanned urbanization is leading to millions living in slums without basic services or decent work. Many your people live without access to safe water and sanitation. Girls are particularly affected by not having access to decent bathrooms when they have their periods – it’s an affront to their dignity. They also travel long distances to fetch water.
The report calls for expansion of basic services and decent housing in urban areas, and access to water and sanitation. It also encourages the participation of young people in disaster risk reduction and in promoting sustainable production and consumption.
‘Prosperity’ is about inclusive and sustainable economic growth. The report points out that universal access to decent work is key to achieving this objective, yet too many young people are excluded from this possibility. Youth are up to six times more likely to be unemployed than adults, and when they do work, they tend to be engaged in informal or vulnerable employment, working but living in poverty. Many who want to start their own businesses lack access to financing and technical support. Too many young people are not receiving academic education or vocational training. All this is increasing an already high level of inequality
The report calls on us to improve access to quality education and vocational training as well as social protection, mustering the political will to dedicate the necessary public resources for that. It urges us to make decent jobs – including the protection of workers’ rights – a top political priority.
‘Peace’ looks at SDG 16: peaceful and inclusive societies with transparent and accountable institutions and access to justice for all. The Asia Pacific is a place of great cultural, ethnic and ideological diversity, and that’s the most important wealth of this region. But people in region have not yet fully embraced this diversity. Hence we see violent conflicts, tendencies toward fundamentalism, extremism and intolerance, leading to violations of human rights. Violence against women and girls is still all too common. Because of the lack of opportunities, the injustices and the discrimination and marginalization encountered by so many, young people tend not to trust in the political systems and in public institutions.
The report calls for engagement of youth as active citizens, especially encouraging political participation, both in voting as well as in running for and holding public office. We need to combat exclusion and fight discrimination in general, and especially violence against women and girls.
‘Partnership’ is about how young people can work together to achieve the SDGs. The report sees great potential in information and communication technology for bringing young people from diverse sectors of society together and getting their voices heard. But internet access is still uneven across and within countries. The report calls for bridging the digital divide to ensure access to ICT for all youth. It also urges us to promote integrated urban and rural development so that both the country side and the cities become spaces where a life of dignity is possible.
These are very general findings and recommendations and are not meant to be recipes or prescriptions. For this report to be useful we need you – the young people -- to analyze the findings and recommendations, criticize them and adjust them to your specific realities. We need you to come up with concrete actions to move things forward.
The difficult part is to do this in such a way that you build dialogue and consensus between people with very different beliefs and interests that are often in conflict with one another, and who sometimes don’t even want to talk to one another. That’s what it means when the 2030 Agenda talks about ‘leaving no one behind’ and building ‘inclusive societies’ and about partnerships. It means that everyone needs to be heard, everyone needs to count – even if you completely disagree with one another.
One important principle in reaching that consensus is that even though every single person counts, when you decide on what’s the priority and what’s urgent, those farthest behind have to come first -- the people who have been the most excluded and marginalized, the most vulnerable, have to come first. In our region, this means the poorest both in the countryside and in the cities, people with disabilities, indigenous peoples, ethnic and religious minorities, lower caste people, LGBT persons, migrants and refugees, stateless people, sex workers, people addicted to drugs, people living with HIV, and, often, women and girls.
Reaching those agreements on what are the shared goals and objectives, what are the priorities and how to achieve them is a difficult and complicated and time-consuming political process, and often a frustrating one because what you get in the end might not be all you aspired for. For young people in particular, and especially for those of you who hold high ideals and aspire to big and important changes as quickly as possible, this is going to be a challenge. But there are no shortcuts if we are serious about being inclusive and leaving no one behind.
These days, the news about the world and about our region seem to be dominated by disheartening stories of violence born of hatred, fear and intolerance of differences. We worry also about shrinking space for people of all beliefs to freely express their opinions and demand their rights to those in power.
But we need to push back on those tendencies, and rather expand that space. We need to open up opportunities for all of us to look at one another and recognize each another as people, with the same right to that life of dignity the 2030 Agenda calls for. We need to open up opportunities for all of us to listen to those whose beliefs and interests are different from our own, and to try to put ourselves in their place. I can tell you that having worked in the UN System for over thirty years, and part of that in efforts at conflict prevention and resolution, that’s one of the most difficult things for human beings to do.
But we appeal to you, the young people of the Asia and Pacific Region, to take on that challenge, and to persevere in this difficult task. Because youth has to be about possibility and discovery and serendipity and reaching out to others -- not about closing ourselves off from the new and the different and the unknown, no matter how scary these may seem; and not about turning away from our fellow human beings – however different they may be from us.
So we look to you to lead us on that path of building this dialogue and collective effort among very diverse groups of people to build nations and societies that can embrace all of us. It will be a difficult path, full of obstacles and setbacks. So let me close with this quote from Martin Luther King: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ Let’s together try to make it bend further, and sooner.
