The UK and the Post-2015 Agenda

I was asked (well asked by myself) to write this post for the WAGGGS Post-2015 Ambassadors blog which will be hitting a screen near you very shortly. To encourage myself to get it written, Im posting it here to start with and will cross post to that blog once it's set up. I will be supplying the link and directing you all to it in the next few weeks, so keep yur eyes peeled!

Youth meeting with UK Minister for International Development

With David Cameron being one of the three co-chairs of the High Level Panel who have been looking at the potential avenues possible in a development agenda for after 2015, the UK has featured quite heavily in activities to date.

I was at the High Level Panel meeting, in London, at the start of November 2012. We convened as a group of 25ish young people (including 4 WAGGGS and 1 WOSM young women) on the day before the Civil Society Outreach Day (which took place after the actual HLP meeting in London). We were allocated an hour and a half roundtable discussion where we presented statements followed by table based discussions with some of the panel members. We tried to focus on the outside the box ideas and youth lead approaches that had worked in some contexts and could be scaled up to be thought about globally.

On our agenda were education, health – Comprehensive Sexuality Education and Services in particular – employment. The theme of the meeting was household poverty so all of these kind of fitted within that. After the youth roundtables there was a town hall meeting style session where people from the panel said some things, we got to make remarks on the theme, and they gave us a few responses. I stood up to say that gender equality, and particularly women’s rights, needs to be insured in the agenda. And a few others from the youth stakeholders also managed to get to make statements. On my way out of the building after the sessions someone who works for the UK Department for International Development (who organised the London meeting) told me he thought the youth session and participants had been the most engaging and productive part of the day, and was thoroughly supportive of the idea of youth being involved in the rest of the process.

What was the impact of this meeting? I think it was the inspiration to include youth more in the process over the following months.

After that some UK youth from various organisations - as well as the employees of big development charities based in the UK - have been at High Level Panel meetings in Monrovia and Bali.UK organisations have been heavily involved in the Beyond2015 campaign, as well as specific groups for young people like the Beyond2015 Children and Youth Working Group and the Major Group on Children and Youth.

But what about the involvement of the wider public? Other than bits and pieces of media coverage in the international pages of some of our bigger newspapers and online news sites (Guardian and BBC in particular), there's been no real effort that I've seen to involve a cross section of the UK population. People don't see what 'development' has to do with them - even though the UK still doesn't achieve all the targets set out in the Millennium Development Goals!

So what do I want to do? My plans that I would like to undertake within and beyond guiding in my country are: to get more people to vote in the MyWorld survey - you can go and vote here: http://www.myworld2015.org/?partner=WAGGGS; to get people to realise (at least within guiding) that when we talk about development, we are calling for positive social change in the UK too; and to develop the skills of my peers to speak out on the issues that matter to them. I believe that only by giving young people the necessary training to know how to advocate, can we expect us to become fully active in the political process.

I'll keep you posted on how I get on.

This post is now available to view on the WAGGGS website at http://wagggsworld.org/en/post2015agenda/post2015_delegatesblog