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World youth set priorities for post-2015 development agenda
BYND2015 Global Youth
Summit: ICTs hold the key to shape our future
San José, Costa Rica, 11 September 2013 – The journey into the
future has begun with the BYND2015 Global Youth Summit setting priorities for
the Future We Want. The
BYND2015
Youth Declaration will be presented today to the President of Costa Rica
Laura Chinchilla, who will take the collective message of the world’s youth to
the United Nations General Assembly later this month.
The aim of young people
gathered in Costa Rica, and those participating from remote hubs around the
world, is to influence the priorities of global leaders and decision-makers at
the United Nations as they set the agenda for sustainable development beyond
2015 to build on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Young participants at
BYND2015 called on governments to provide more flexible, dynamic and open means
of governing to reach more people more easily than presently possible. They
emphasized that the key to a successful development paradigm will be innovation
and asked for education systems that equip students with not just theoretical
knowledge, but with a practical mix of marketable, innovative and relevant
skills needed to compete in the global, digital economy.
In the area of
healthcare, participants believed ICT tools should be developed that will
redefine how we experience health care in the future, with innovative systems
that would connect patients to information on health services, and improve the
issues of accessibility, affordability and acceptability. Focusing on a
sustainable future, the Summit called for a world where we don't have to choose
between quality of life and quality of the environment and called on governments
to leverage innovative, ICT-based tools for warning, information, preparedness
and recovery in the face of natural disasters. They also advocated being smart
and safe, calling for greater awareness-raising to make our online communities
safe while embracing all the tools, technologies and industries which shape the
online world.
“Young people nurtured in
a world of technological innovation have demonstrated at BYND2015 that ICTs are
the driving force to meet future sustainable development goals,” said ITU
Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré. “Their engagement in the Global Youth Summit –
the hundreds who made the journey to Costa Rica, and the thousands who connected
from remote hubs around the world – ensures their inclusion in the most
important decisions of the 21st Century. After all, today’s youth
will inherit the world tomorrow. And they will be our future leaders.”
In a first for UN
summits, young people from around the world showed collectively that ICTs
connect people in ways never experienced earlier and that social media can forge
positive engagement beyond national and cultural barriers in a common purpose to
make the world a better place.
Over 600 young
participants from 68 countries met in San José, 9-11 September 2013 along with
over 4000 others who joined the discussion virtually from 50 hubs in 30
countries in self-organized workshops. Over 1000 unique ideas were generated on
the specially designed online crowdsourcing platform where the youth community
has voted around 15,000 times and provided more than 12,000 comments. Tens of
thousands of people joined the conversation via social media with a combined
reach on Twitter alone of over 16 million. The online conversation took place in
74 languages, where education, health and access to ICTS ranked as the highest
trending topics.
Demonstrating
emphatically that digital inclusion is of critical importance to building a
knowledge-based information society, many of the young people participating in
BYND2015 from remote hubs were people who are not normally connected to the
Internet and do not own a computer.
BYND2015 also brought
together over 60 software developers and computer geeks from around the world in
a 24-hour Hackathon to hack the MDGs and create apps with a focus on health,
education and the environment that would help define and achieve sustainable
development. Thematic and technology experts leant their weight behind this
effort to generate technology-based solutions aimed at addressing global
challenges.
Listening to the young
deliberating issues that would affect their future were Dame Patience Jonathan,
First Lay of Nigeria and Champion of ITU’s Child Online Protection, Nestor
Osario, president of the UN Economic
and Social Council (ECOSOC), and UN Secretary-General’s special envoy for youth,
Ahmad Alhendawi.
Mr Alhendawi said he was
committed to taking the message of youth to the United Nations, while urging
young people to take responsibility themselves to continue to make themselves
heard.
The Youth Summit found
strong support in key ITU partners Ooredoo, Claro and Intel and a host of other
partners who supported different sessions and activities as well as the
Telecentre.org Foundation, which mobilized its global telecentres community to
participate actively in BYND2015.
“Ooredoo is a founding
partner of the Global Youth Summit because we believe that supporting the needs
and aspirations of the next generation is an essential duty for communications
companies,” said Sheikh Abdullah Bin Mohammed Bin Saud Al Thani, Chairman of
Ooredoo. “The ideas and recommendations of the event will make a major
contribution to human growth and development in the coming years.”
Social media channels:
www.itu.int/en/bynd2015/Pages/social-media.aspx
For more information, please see
www.itu.int/en/bynd2015/Pages/newsroom.aspx or contact:
Sanjay Acharya
Chief, Media Relations and Public Information
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Caterina Elizondo Lucci
Periodista,Oficina de Comunicación
Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología y
Telecomunicaciones
Costa Rica
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+506 8311 8725 |
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