Youth: What is Being Done?

United Nations ESCAP
HRD Section

Youth: What is Being Done?

ESCAP's Activities for Youth

With their creativity, dynamism and talents, youth form an enormous resource for development and social change. ESCAP's regional activities for youth are undertaken as part of its HRD programme. They are geared toward contributing to ESCAP's priority of poverty alleviation. The activities focus on programmes to enhance the productive capabilities of young people in the region. Most of the activities are implemented in collaboration with youth organizations.

One high-profile activity in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the International Youth Year (IYY) has been the 1995 round of the ESCAP HRD Award . ESCAP has also conducted a series of training and skills development activities for youth at both the regional and national levels. One major project focuses on the training of youth workers dealing with disadvantaged groups, including unemployed and undereducated youth. This three-year project involves a series of training workshops for youth workers, focusing on managerial and entrepreneurial skills training for micro-enterprise development and environmental awareness.

ESCAP is also working with other United Nations agencies to address the education and training needs of young people. Under a project being implemented in collaboration with UNESCO, a regional workshop on distance education as an aspect of HRD was convened in Shanghai in October 1995. The workshop aimed to promote distance education, particularly through the development and utilization of mass communications technology, as a means of tapping the vast human resources development potential of the region's youth. Another, recently completed project, aimed at strengthening youth organizations and NGOs in the promotion of literacy among young girls and women in South Asia.

In October 1996, ESCAP convened a regional meeting on youth and human resources development in Beijing, in collaboration with the All-China Youth Federation, to devise means of supporting the regional implementation of the World Programme of Action. It was the first regional gathering on youth to be convened by ESCAP since the IYY in 1985. Also in observance of the tenth anniversary of IYY, a regional survey of youth policies and programmes was undertaken. A summary of the key concerns for youth as well as some indicators of participation, drawn from this survey, can also be found on this site.

Furthermore, ESCAP provides advisory services to member countries in the area of youth for development. Such assistance was recently provided to the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of Cambodia in the preparation and development of a youth master plan and policy framework for the country.