Accelerating Youth Empowerment for Sustainable Development
The Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union (AU) has declared, during its last Executive Council held in January 2009 in Addis Ababa, the years 2009-2019 as the decade of youth development in Africa.
The decade is an opportunity to advance the agenda of youth development in all member states across the AU, to ensure effective and more ambitious investment in youth development programmes and increased support to the development and implementation of national youth policies and programmes and facilitate the implementation of theAfrican Youth Charter (AYC).
During the 15th Ordinary Session of the AU Heads of State and Government, held in Uganda in 2010, the Assembly adopted ‘’Accelerating Youth Empowerment for Sustainable Development’’ as the theme for the next Summit which will be held in Equatorial Guinea in July 2011.
The African Youth Forum (AYF 2011) is the pre-Summit event to raise awareness and mobilize effective commitment and actions on the part of all stakeholders and partners at all levels to mainstream youth concerns into development policies, strategies, programmes and plans in Africa.
The expected outcomes of the pre-summit Forum will be resolutions and recommendations to be submitted to the AU Assembly in the form of a document. The Forum will be preceded by the High Level Consultations on Youth Development issues, which has the objective to raise the attention on the empowerment of Youth in Africa and monitor the adoption of the African Youth Charter, it will also try to establish a trust fund in support of youth development in Africa and will be followed by the Experts and Minister’s Conference Bureau meetings which will take into accounts the document prepared during the Forum and validate it.
Discussions and revisions of the draft agenda and programme of work of the pre-Summit Forum will be led by the Department of Human Resource Science & Technology (HRST)which is the body responsible for youth related issues within the African Union Commission (AUC) and will take place during those days and thereafter among the steering committee members: FAO, ILO, IOM, UNFPA, ECA, UNAIDS, UNESCO, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNIFEM, UNEP, WFP, OIF, UNDP, Africa Youth Trust, Trust Africa, Ford Foundation, OSIEA, Pan African Youth Union, World Aids Campaign, IPPF-YAM, GIZ, and Handicap International.
FAO will contribute to the process on the aspects related to rural youth employment and in particularly support the session dedicated to “Implementing and Funding Youth Employment Action Plans and Creating New Jobs”, jointly with ILO.
FAO has been requested by the AU’s Department of Human Resource Science & Technology to provide a brief position paper on the topic of rural youth employment as well as a collection of best practices on FAO’s activities on the same issue.
Francesca Dalla Valle from FAO’s Rural Employment Team will participate to the pre-Summit and Summit events jointly with colleagues based at the FAO’s Subregional Office for Eastern Africa in Addis Ababa.