Pretoria – As focus gradually shifts to the post-2015 agenda, a call has been made for governments across the world to place young people high on the list of development priorities.
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) wants to see young people feature prominently on governments’ plans beyond the Millennium Development Goals 2015 deadline. The body is now using World Population Day (WPD) 2014, which will be observed on 11 July, to get this message across.
The theme for this year’s WPD is ‘Investing in Young People’, in line with the UNFPA’s goal of ensuring the well-being of the youth.
Here at home, the Deputy Minister of Social Development, Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu, will spend WPD with 50 young people from across the country.
They will meet at an event at Morula Sun in Mabopane, Gauteng, where they will spend the day discussing the role these youngsters play in youth development in their communities.
The day will give these bright young people, who are shining stars in their own right, a chance to interact with the deputy minister. It’s not only an opportunity for them to share their accomplishments with someone in high office – it’s a chance for them to tell Deputy Minister Bogopane-Zulu the challenges they face in their communities, and more importantly, how they would like the department to help.
Youth selfie campaign
The UNFPA’s World Population Day commemorations are tied in with its youth campaign, which is designed to get millions of “selfies” from young people, decision-makers, high-profile celebrities and others.
This is to support the UNFPA’s proposal for a youth goal to be included in the post-2015 development agenda.
There are 1.8 billion people aged 10 - 24 in the world, making up one quarter of the world’s population. In South Africa, nearly 40% of the population is made up of young people between the ages of 15 and 35.
The Social Development Department explained that the idea behind the “selfie” campaign is to gather these photos as a show of support, and then use the collection to tell the powers that be that young people all over the world want to be “put in the picture” of future development plans.
“Among the key issues facing young people to be highlighted during the 2014 World Population Day campaign are poverty, access to education and health care (including reproductive health rights), teenage pregnancy, child marriage, female genital mutilation, youth unemployment, violence, death and injury,” the department said.
The South African Human Rights Commission Report, Poverty Traps and Social Exclusion among Children in South Africa 2014, notes that while there is still widespread evidence of deep-rooted poverty amongst children (people younger than 18 years), in the two decades since South Africa’s transition to democracy, the country has experienced considerable success in reducing poverty. This is both in money terms and in other ways such as increased access to services like water and sanitation.
This applies particularly to children, who in a period of declining fertility, were also the beneficiaries of the Child Support Grant, which contributes a lot to reducing the number of children who go to bed hungry. – SAnews.gov.za
