CSD Day Three

I guess one of the random highlights of the day was finding an unexpected drinks reception in the UN lobby. We went upstairs from the dungeon-like basement to discover free beverages, a jazz trio and lots of well-dressed people socialising happily.

Apart from that, I finally got my hands on a camera and was able to start filming. TakingITGlobal kindly lent me a Sony handheld and it's a relief to begin at last. Shame about the other days, but there was plenty of other stuff going on to be occupied with.

A few people also formed a new Youth Delegate lobbying group, which will work on trying to increase the number of delegations containing a national representative of young people. At this CSD, there are seven official Youth Delegates from five countries, all of which are in Europe. That's not a great number. At the WPAY review we had over 50 - it should really be more than this for every UN event.

One of the best ideas we had was creating a "WANTED" poster for Youth Delegates using silhouettes of a girl and a boy. Hopefully that will be ready for later this week. Another method was entitled the 'Schnipsel Campagne' - a German name. We thought of a few funny advertising slogans for Youth Delegates and will print these on small slips of paper ('Schnipsel' is the German word for this), which will be distributed all over the UN General Assembly building. A few of our phrases were:

Feel 20 years younger - get a Youth Delegate!
Do you need a new face? Get a Youth Delegate!
Craving for something fresh? Get a Youth Delegate!
Want to spice up your delegation? Get a Youth Delegate!
Do you feel empty inside? Get a Youth Delegate!

We had about 10 overall and will get them printed soon. The idea is to hopefully make people laugh when they read the slips, so the idea of getting a Youth Delegate will stick in their minds and they will consider it.

Today was also a great day for the Youth Caucus as a whole. A "Multi-stakeholder Dialogue Session" (great UN name) took place in the morning and every CSD Major Group was entitled to make a statement. The Children and Youth speech was read by our Nepalese delegate Sudyumna Dahal and was actually one of the shortest of the lot - a very good thing in my opinion. A drafting group had been working tirelessly since Monday to perfect the text and it went well.

Sud told his story of the successful mini-hydropower project in some detail and that was a great start. He then moved on to talk about the North American Campus Climate Challenge and the Ghanaian Youth Employment Summit irrigation project I heard about first on day one. Really amazing stuff - hopefully we can get some of these case studies into the CSD Matrix document.

Something else I did was attend a side event being run by UNESCO on the theme of sustainable development education. It wasn't exactly the most interactive event ever, but some of the content was interesting. Speakers from Germany and Manitoba in Canada spoke about programmes they're working on and the results they've achieved. At the moment we're in the UN Decade of Education on Sustainable Development, so member states should be counting this as a priority.

One thing which happened in that room really struck me. It wasn't any of the presentations or speakers, but something which happened later on in the short question and answer session. A lady from UNICEF who works on water development schemes stood up and told us all about some of her recent projects, which included a productive forum for Mexican schoolchildren at a recent event there. The host from UNESCO was evidently interested to hear about this and said they should speak afterwards about how to work together in future. OK, it's good for this to happen, but why hadn't something like it ever been done before?

The UN has innumerable different branches, each with its own confusing acronym, and a reputation for being notoriously disorganised. I'd never witnessed it so directly before though and it was a bit of a wake-up call. If this organisation is to progress, there will need to be better channels of communication between its organs to enable more joint working towards common goals.

On Monday when the media people broke up into smaller teams, a "creative expression" group was formed. Their job was looking into ways to liven up the UN, giving the Youth Caucus a visual presence and getting people to notice what we were doing. Their action for today was incredibly successful. The idea was to create a giant world map and loads of little origami windmills, cheesily named "Windmills of Change", then get people to write their name and country on the fins and pin them to their country if they were in support of action on climate change.


After a couple of hours the map started looking awesome, as you can see above - great work!

CSD Day Two

Again I'm sitting in the Vienna Cafe in the basement of the UN General Assembly building. It's been busy again, but not to the same extent as Monday - hardly surprising really, since we were starting off and had lots of things to arrange.

Yesterday at 4pm I attended a side event run by the Global Youth Action Network and it was an education. The issues under discussion at this CSD session aren't exactly my specialist subjects, so I'm learning all the time.

Taking place in the Dag Hammarskold Auditorium, which I remembered well from October, the event opened up with a brief presentation by a representative of the UN Programme on Youth. He gave a general outline of the work they do, such as other partipation activities of young people at the UN. Youth Delegates to the General Assembly were a major point, along with the massively successful WPAY review I attended last year.

Then we had a presentation about sustainable energy activities in North America. There's some awesome work going on at lots of university campuses to use more environmentally-friendly energy sources such as wind power. In one case, students even voted in a referendum to pay higher fees when the extra amount went to emissions reduction programmes.

Students and young people have been the driving force for change in many historical situations and that kind of monumental effort seems to be brewing up at the moment. The climate change agenda is clearly an important issue to many and they are taking action in the best way possible: by changing the places they live their everyday lives.

The second presentation was by our CSD youth delegate from Nepal. He spoke about projects he co-ordinates at home which are having a great impact. Young people are organising ways the country can make the most of its large potential for hydroelectricity, working in partnership with energy companies run by young entrepreneurs. In some cases they are dedicating part of their profit to improving sustainable energy. Peer education is also taking place to teach younger children about the importance of sustainable development to their futures.

Thirdly, there was a short speech from Youth Caucus Co-ordinator Emmanuel Edudzie about projects in his home country of Ghana. I was particularly interested to hear about these, since it's the hopeful destination for part two of filming for the documentary. He only went into detail about one example, but it was fascinating. The Youth Employment Network of Ghana won a grant from a competitive international funding scheme and is using the money to improve agriculture on the country's west coast, where 90% of its farming output is produced.

Irrigation techniques were massively modernised. Farms traditionally operate using a system of human-operated wells, with a very time consuming process of watering the crops. It could take entire days to bring up enough water to feed the fields, so resultantly there was no time to expand the farm and output was greatly limited.

Now, however, the use of new machinery to draw up buckets of water and supply it to the land has meant a great amount of time is saved. Even better: the machine is powered by a windmill-driven turbine. The farmers are able increase their lands and output, which also creates employment opportunities for young people in the surrounding area - in addition, a few have learnt about how to maintain the well machine and are paid to do so. More livelihoods, more produce, more efficiency. I can't wait to visit Ghana!

As for today, we had the usual Youth Caucus daily briefing in conference room B, then split up again into smaller groups to work on specific issues. There has been a lot of progress; we had another media group meeting at 6pm yesterday evening and things were looking good. In the intervening time between then and now, people have been working on the youth statement for a Multistakeholder Dialogue Session tomorrow and preparing case studies of youth-led sustainable development projects. One of our main goals it to try to get some of these featured in the excitingly-named "Matrix" document, a compendium of successful examples of sustainable development initiatives being implemented across the world. Currently there are no cases being run by young people, so we're aiming to change that in a major way. Caucus representatives sitting at the youth seat in every session will intervene whenever possible to promote the youth-led projects and there will be a big emphasis on them tomorrow for the dialogue session.

Hopefully we can make a real difference!

CSD Day One - the story so far...

At the moment I'm sitting in the Vienna Cafe, located in the basement of the main UN building. It's really smoky down here since this is international territory and domestic non-smoking laws don't apply! Lots of the diplomats and delegates seem to like having a quick cigarette and coffee between meetings and lots of the most important discussions in the UN are famed to take place around these times.

It's been a busy day. Our first Youth Caucus meeting took place from 10-11 and there was a great turnout, with lots of new young people who couldn't make it to the Blast event on Saturady. We started out with a quick introductory game before getting some more information on what's coming up.

One of the most important tasks was to sort out who is going to sit in the "Children and Youth" seat at the Themed Discussions today and tomorrow. As I said before, it's vital for there to be a young face at every meeting to give us a visible presence in this event. People need to know we're here and they need to take notice.

An important part of getting people to take notice will be media outreach. After the Caucus meeting ended at 11, gatherings of smaller groups were convened in the cafeteria/restaurant area upstairs to discuss specialised issues. It was great to see lots of participants taking an interest in being part of the media group and we had a very productive general discussion about possible strategies.

We then split up into smaller subgroups. The "Action" team will organise creative ways to generate media exposure, with possible publicity stunts to get journalists' attention. A recent major youth meeting in Montreal apparently received a lot of attention, including in the New York Times, so we're going to try and use some of the same methods. I guess the main problem is that the CSD isn't anything more than a discussion with stakeholders - no binding declarations are produced and therefore no real hook for reporters. So it's going to be down to us to generate the headlines and that's where the creativity of youth will come in.

The other groups are working on logistics and the general message of our media campaign. It's going to be very important for everyone to be presenting the same case; we don't want people saying different things in articles or anything like that. Logistically, this will also be quite complicated to organise - the three small groups will have to work closely together but so we'll need good channels of communication at all times.