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!
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!
posted by Frederick at 17:30
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