Erik, next week you are going back to New York for the UN General Assembly segment on youth. Can you tell a bit more about what is going to happen there and why is it such an important event for young people?
It’s the World Programme of Action for Youth that is going to be commemorated. It’s the youth policy paper of the United Nations, basically the best paper we have internationally about youth development and the role of youth in international co-operation.
Why is that important for youth? It’s basically covering all the main youth issues like employment, education, environment - and we hope that to the ten older priority areas we’ll also add five new ones: HIV/AIDS, intergenerational issues (which is a very important issue in Western Europe) ICTs and technology, youth and children in armed conflict and globalization. These five new priority issues are really important these days and especially HIV/AIDS is not longer just a health problem, it is so important to look at the social aspects as well.
So for youth it’s the most basic lobby toolkit, it’s everything you need to lobby your government about sending youth delegates, investing more in youth-led development programs, investing more in youth organizations – it’s all in there. It’s the first piece of paper you want to look at it if you want to lobby your government, if you want to work on projects.
This week it’s going to be reviewed and we have two plenary sessions at the General Assembly devoted to it next week. So we need to use this momentum to get these youth issues higher on the agenda. Because what is happening with the implementation of the World Programme? Many governments are really far behind with their youth policies - a lot of governments still don’t even have a youth policy. But this is strange, because the situation of youth basically just isn’t the same as the situation of older people or of children, it is really a very important stage in life - being young, being youth. And raising awareness on youth policies, looking back what governments did and especially looking forward to what governments can do – this is what is going to be discussed next week. Also what youth and youth organization can do. What issues are important right now? What should we focus on? What do we miss right now?
Do you know how many young people, how many youth delegates will be there next week?
We already have 3o youth delegates that are definitely going to come and 5 probably. So there are 35 now, but we expect to have 40-45 youth delegates – and we never had more than 11 youth delegates. So going to 40-45 is a lot and that’s a victory for youth policy and for young people from all over the world. We even have youth delegates from Africa now, a couple from Asia, a couple from South America. And there are a lot of youth organizations that will be there during that week, that will try to influence and try to lobby for things.
Can you explain how you become a youth delegate, how is the usual process? If I’m a young person, what shall I do if I want to become an official youth delegate?
In about 25 countries now we have elections. Some of them were closed within the commission of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that happens in a lot of countries. If you have existing structures (more and more countries have these structures of youth councils or UN Associations) then you just have young people apply to become the official youth delegate.
If you don’t have these structures, but you still want to have a youth delegate or you want to become a youth delegate yourself you have to lobby your government and relevant organizations. The first organization you can look for, for example, is UNFPA that strongly supports youth participation.
But you can also go to your government and talk to them, especially get in contact with your Minster of Foreign Affairs. In the UK for example, a couple of youth from the UN Youth Association just went up to their Minister, had an appointment with him for one hour and the next day they were told that they were going to send 3 youth delegates. It can go very fast, but again it’s lobbying and it is important to get a lot of organizations behind you. Every organization has to come to your Minister of Foreign Affairs and ask: ‘why don’t we have a youth delegate, isn’t it important to involve young people?’
Also, you can get in touch with the UN Youth Program, they are really supporting youth delegates and trying to get more. Also get in touch with youth delegates from other countries. On the website of the UN Youth Program (www.un.org/youth) you can find a lot of information about youth delegates from the past and how you can lobby your government. Get in contact with a youth delegate and show your government how important it is to send youth delegates, show them how useful it has been in the past and what a shame it is that they are not sending a youth delegate while 45 other countries are.
I know that the process in The Netherlands is a little different. Can you explain to us how you were selected?
We had for 34 years elections within the Youth Council and then a year ago a campaign bureau decided that it would be a good thing if you would have the youth delegate being elected by Dutch youth and that the youth delegate shouldn’t be just someone who is young and working with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but a real youth that doesn’t has be representing one organization, but just a young person from The Netherlands with experience in development cooperation and in reaching youth.
So they decided to have an open election: everyone could participate, everyone could become a youth delegate and everyone could vote. What we had first, was of course a commission; we had to send motivation letters, CVs - just the regular stuff. From the people who sent that in a couple of dozens of candidates were selected and invited to oral presentations to talk about their goals for a couple of minutes, go into debates and try to figure out how they would try to get Dutch youth involved and how they would try to present Dutch youth within the UN and the government delegation.
Within this commission there was always a big audience. For example, this commission could choose two people from every round and then one other person was selected by that audience to go to the next round. After a couple of rounds there were 6 candidates left. From those 6 candidates, every week 2 of these 6 candidates had to run elections and had to gather as many votes from organizations in The Netherlands.
It was a surprise, because we had a lot of votes during those first weeks. For example I won that round with 3,000 votes which is a lot for a small country as The Netherlands and thinking that’s more votes than the average Senate member gets to get elected for the Senate!
Then from these 6 candidates, 3 were selected for the finals. 1,500 young people from all over The Netherlands that worked in development cooperation and in different organizations were invited for the finals to Paradiso, which is the coolest club in Amsterdam. We had a lot of debates there with experts and the candidates for the youth delegates. And the people that were in the audience and that could listen to you the whole night could vote and their vote counted double. Other people could vote too, through the Internet, it was followed by national TV, by a lot of regional TV stations and radio stations.
It was really interesting to see how many people were following it and how many votes there were. Because in 2,5 hours we had 10,000 votes, which is outrageous for The Netherlands, which is a small country - we only have 16 million inhabitants.
From those 10,000 votes I got 70%. It was great to get that much support from youth from all over The Netherlands, not knowing you but still seeing something in you, while you have to represent them in the coming years as a youth delegate.
So it helped a lot because as I said it was the first time that the MDGs were in the news and it was the first time that that amount of young people, just normal young people, were thinking “that’s an easy way I can participate, an easy way I can make sure that someone gets there to become youth delegate, that can really represent us and talk about international cooperation and talk about the role of young people in the world, in international politics, in the work in the field”.
Are there any other advantages you see in this kind of system instead of just having a small jury or one organization select the person?
Well, I think it was very good, too, for our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and politicians in The Netherlands to see what young people can do. Imagine in these elections there were 60 very good candidates, who had a lot of experiences. It really showed various organizations and Ministries and politicians how important youth can be and it convinced a couple of other countries to send youth delegates, too. It really was in the news, it brought a couple of issues on the agenda and it got more youth involved in organizations.
I’m just thinking about other countries and usually you say young people are fed up with the political system and they just don’t want to vote – that’s the only thing we can actually do when it comes to politics. So I’m wondering, do you think this is actually something… how young people want to get involved? Do you see this as a system to get more young people interested in politics?
That’s what I meant with saying that I was elected with more votes than every other person in the Senate. Imagine what that does to a Senate member who has been in the senate for 20 years, who was elected for 4 times. It’s funny to see that young people are willing to vote and really think ‘I want to follow this election, I want to know who is representing me there, I want to know what this person wants to put on the agenda, I want to know what that person wants to do’. It was such an experience for politicians to see this. So many youth showed: We want to vote, but we don’t want to vote for people who are 50, 60 years old!
So it really made a lot of political parties conscious about involving more young people in their structures, in their work and involving more young people in policy making and in their political parties.
Because in one way or the other young people were triggered to vote in elections, and it’s a good way for raising awareness on various issues but it’s also a very good way to get more youth politically conscious.
That’s great. I think it’s fascinating to see, talking about how young people are fed up with the political system and they don’t want to vote, to see that when we are talking about issues that really concern young people, then there actually is the interest there.
And it wasn’t even an official election; it was really just something that was organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Dutch National Youth Council. But imagine if you would really make a real structure for this in various different countries how many votes you could have. Like for example in France where the average age of politicians is very high, I would see this as a great example for politicians to involve more young people. – It’s interesting, if it concerns them, if the candidates are from their age, if they can relate to these candidates, it works.
Well, I want to come back now to what you briefly mentioned already at the beginning and that is youth delegates from developing countries. First of all, why do you think there are so few youth delegates from developing countries and my second question would be, how can we, young people from developed countries, help bring more youth form Africa, Asia and Latin America to the UN in New York.
There are two interesting parts to this: First, in developing countries there are not many structures like in Europe for example, where we have youth councils since the 60ies or the 70ies and that’s of course a problem for youth getting involved in developing countries.
But on the other hand you can see that a lot of developing countries are very young, more than half of the population is under 25, a lot of governments base their policies on youth. For example Senegal has very strong youth policies, they have been very youth orientated for the last 15 years. But it’s interesting to see why they don’t have a youth delegate? Because the structure is more difficult, a lot of countries are afraid, because you have this young person, who is not a member of a political party, who is not speaking on behalf of the government, but on the other hand what this young person says is considered as national policies. For a lot of countries this is scary.
A lot of countries don’t even know that they have this active youth. That’s why the public elections in The Netherlands were very important to show how many capable youth there were in The Netherlands that wanted to become youth delegates.
So I think the structure story is difficult and of course money is a main issue, too. But then… The best responses I get as a youth delegate are not from the Western European countries but are from countries from the South. They are the most interested in the things I do, they are the most interested in youth policies, because they realize that more than half of their population is young and it’s really interesting for countries to influence this group of people and to get this group of people behind them. It is dangerous not to influence youth, not to have youth participating, because youth can be very positive leaders, youth can be the most interesting, they can be very enthusiastic, very motivated, wanting to change things, can be positive contributors for a better society, can work in great projects, but they can also bring a lot of problems.
So when you are at the UN, is that one way you are trying to get more youth delegates from the South to attend by talking to their governments and showing them this is what I’m doing and this is how it could help you?
Yes. For example in March I was at a big conference and I spoke to the Ambassador of Senegal, the Minister of Internal Affairs of South Africa and the Secretary of State of Uganda. I just talked to those people about sending youth delegates and I tried to convince them. It’s something I tried to do at the Millennium Summit, too.
And of course, from a lot of countries I know that there are already strong lobbies and that there are very good structures and very good youth organizations that could select a youth delegate. So I try to tell their governments that. For example I told the Minister of Internal Affairs of South Africa that there is a very good kind of youth council and he was very interested and told his assistant to make arrangements for him with the board of that youth council there. That really helps their lobby.
I also get a lot of e-mails from youth from the south that have ideas about electing a youth delegate and really want to do that. They can very well lobby for themselves, but I try to support and strengthen their lobbies.
Do you know of other youth delegates doing the same kind of work, is that a kind of mission you all have?
As far as I know I was the only youth delegate who was working with the UN Youth Program on getting more youth delegates. But I know for example that the youth delegate of last year from LSU, the Swedish National Youth Council, worked on lobbying for more youth delegates from the South and they got their government to sponsor a youth delegate from Ghana.
But I had an advantage, I was elected last year 21st of October, so I had time, but other youth delegates were only elected in April, May or June. So I can see that it’s difficult to do things like that. And for me it was really hard, too, to keep up with things and I had to sacrifice a lot. You miss so many resources. I just wasn’t able to work 24/7 as a youth delegate, because I had to work in a grocery store to pay for my train tickets. It’s just that simple. And it’s a problem for youth from all over the place - try from Bangladesh to become a youth delegate and get your government pay your ticket to New York.
Another thing - I was trying to do this - is to look for funds in The Netherlands and in Western Europe to support youth delegates from the South, but unfortunately, they didn’t want to support me. Big organizations, Embassies, Ministries they can send their people, but try to send youth…
But you are doing it for free because its fun, because it’s good when you get your goals, if, if you succeed in getting a youth delegate from Jordan, or one from Bangladesh, if you succeed to get your government to sponsor two youth delegate from the south - that’s great, it feels good. That’s what you are doing it for. And you learn a lot and learning is fun.
Is there anything you want to add, anything you want to tell the young people that are reading this interview?
You don’t have to start from scratch. For example, on the TakingITGlobal website there is so much information on the MDGs, how you can advocate, how you can lobby for things, there are whole toolkits on the TakingITGlobal site and on the un.org/youth website. There is so much you can do. You can get in contact with youth delegates from the past, for example you can get in contact with me. I just realized it’s so important to be there when to influence policies and you just have to show that you can be part of that. And I don’t know, I’m just really looking forward to have you write the interview down.
Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time for this interview. I know you are extremely busy this week with all the preparations for the General Assembly next week, so I really appreciate it and it has been a very interesting interview for me.
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