by Rana Bilal Ahmad
Published on: Sep 26, 2002
Topic:
Type: Opinions

The days I spent at Alexandria, Egypt during Youth Employment Summit are ever memorable for me. The summit core organizers Poonam Ahulwalia, Fredrick Clark and Dumisani Nyoni moved heaven and earth to make this summit successful with the help of other organizers. The support and cooperation of members of organizing committee of YES 2002 especially of Dr Ismail Serageldin, Jennifer Corriero, Jose-Maria Figueres, Janet Whitla and Hafsat Abiola was really remarkable. I am also extremely impressed by the warm hospitality of Government of Egypt and their minister of youth affairs H.E Mr. Ali Helal. Here I also want to salute the enthusiastic, motivated and devoted young people who were gathered there to shoulder the responsibility of implementation of outcomes of the summit in their communities. Hats off!!!!! to all of them.

The thing which gives me real pleasure is the achievement of YES’s proposed mission as a civil society movement has been seeded to stimulate and inspire the development of programs and policies worldwide in order to ensure that the youth have access to the education and training programs, skills-development opportunities, resources, and credit that they need to build productive and sustainable livelihoods. Today, I am seeing a global movement against youth unemployment and it’s the first success of Youth Employment Summit 2002.

As YES 2002 was a global youth event and hundreds of rising generation’s members from different communities, cultures and countries were present there to share their plans and ideas to overcome the gigantic problem of youth unemployment and other youth related problems and hence YES 2002 was an excellent opportunity for networking and making sustainable relationships.

All the sessions of the summit were very edifying and informative and we gained a lot from these sessions.

After the summit on September 12th 2002 capacity building workshops were arranged in the Arab Academy of Science and Technology to train the young people how to put in practice the outcomes of the summit. I think that every delegate came back home with strong determination to eliminate youth unemployment from the world. I know it’s a hard task but I have a firm believe on Quaid’s words, “You can’t fail if your spirits are young and you are committed to the cause”.




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