Appendix 4— United Nations and IANYS Cooperation |
The United Nations and National Youth Service: 1968-2000By William David Angel, Chief, United Nations Youth UnitThe United Nations has for many years been interested in this topic, having begun in 1968 with studies, seminars and technical cooperation projects on National Youth Service, especially to promote and strengthen such services by, for and with youth, and focused initially on developing countries. And, as 2001 is the United Nations International Year of Volunteers, there is a need to note both the history of the role of the United Nations in promoting National Youth Service as well as the potential to renew and to strengthen this role. One of the first UN inter-agency youth projects began in 1968 in Holte Denmark with an Inter-Regional Seminar on National Youth Service Programs and in 1970 in Jamaica with UN system support for a National Youth Service in that country and an African Regional Seminar on National Youth Service Programs was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) on 23 November-4 December 1970. 1970 was also the year in which the United Nations General Assembly established the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) that became a major focal point in the United Nations system for promoting National Youth Service programs. The UNV supported the development of many such National Youth Service programs in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Western Asia in the years 1970-1985 via a program called by UNV "Domestic Development Service: DDS". In 1971, the United Nations Youth Unit published a book entitled "New Trends in Service by Youth" which addressed the following questions: 1) Aims and Organization of Service by Youth, 2) Fields of Service, 3) The United Nations and Service By Youth, and 4) Evaluation and Future Action. And again in 1975, the United Nations Youth Unit published a book entitled: Service By Youth: A Survey of Eight Country Experiences, and examined such National Youth Service programs in the Philippines, Kenya, Chile, Yugoslavia, Poland, Lebanon and United Kingdom, and presented a second part with commentary on "Service by Youth" and "Service to Youth" and how both pertained to National Youth Policy. While UNV focused on the role of Governmental action, UNESCO's Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service (CCIVS) focused on the role of non-governmental action in that regard. In 1985, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed an International Youth Year (IYY) with three specific themes: Participation, Development, Peace. National Youth Service was seen as an essential vehicle to promote youth participation in development for peace. However, in 1985 for IYY, the General Assembly adopted United Nations Guidelines on Youth which stressed the need for such action to be taken in the framework of developing integrated national youth polices and programs. Indeed, if the topic of National Youth Service had been seen before as part of sectoral action carried out by specific ministries and NGOs concerned with specific issues such as employment promotion, vocational training, environmental conservation, adolescent health services, educational voluntary services etc, the General Assembly in 1985 focused on how such National Youth Service programs could be integral parts of a multi-sectoral national youth policy and national youth program of action. A United Nations Youth Fund was created as a follow-up to this International Youth Year and a number of grants were made by the Fund to support National Youth Service programs in developing countries. As an example, in 1998, a grant from this Fund was made to the National Youth Service of Peru to support a training program in Lima for young entrepreneurs. Ten years later, the United Nation General Assembly adopted in 1995 a World Program of Action for Youth which set forth ten priority issues for action, and called for two global youth platforms to both review and promote this program of action: a World Conference of Ministers Responsible for Youth (representing the voices of Governmental Ministers in charge of national youth programs) and a World Youth Forum (representing the voices of youth: representatives of non-governmental youth organizations). The World Youth Forum has met three times and the fourth session will be in Dakar, Senegal on 5-12 August 2001, and the World Conference of Ministers Responsible for Youth has met once in 1998 and the second session will be in Istanbul, Turkey in 2002 or 2003. There have also been a number of regional conferences of ministers responsible for youth and regional youth forums linked to both of these new global youth platforms. However, the issue of National Youth Service has somehow been lost in the United Nations shuffle of issues taken up by those meetings. So it is most important that the International Association for National Youth Service (IANYS) has sponsored five such global meetings on National Youth Service. I think the time has come to explore how we can better link these global youth meetings to each other and to the United Nations system and raise the global profile of National Youth Service as an important part of an integrated and multi-sectoral national youth policy. On reviewing the literature of all three of those global youth conferences, I have seen that very little attention has been given to that topic. So I think the time has come to forge an alliance between the United Nations and the IANYS for closer cooperation in preparing, convening and following up such conferences in cooperation with the 188 Member States of the United Nations and the thousands of global, regional, and national non-governmental youth organizations accredited to the United Nations. After signing that Draft Letter of Cooperation on 15 June 2000 in Jerusalem, we will undertake the following actions:
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