Youth Action in Transforming Education and Achieving the SDGs
Youth action has a significant role to play in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Agenda 2063, including the Continental Education Strategy for Africa as articulated by the United Nations and the African Union respectively. Since higher educational institutions are leaders in education, research and innovation, they also have an important role in advancing sustainable development through well-articulated youth voices as a device for social, societal and economic change. Youth actions come in different forms to create an awareness of the need to build substantive and accommodative communities with norms and policies that worth societal growth.
Throughout the world, youth direct action has been a feature of higher education and intellectual build-up. On the African continent, the early stages of youth action focused on national politics and policies to bring about independence in colonized countries. Post-independence, African youths engaged in a second liberation struggle for social justice and democracy. In Asia, since the Second World War, the youth have organized protest movements that tumbled authoritarian regimes in some countries and threatened governments in others.
In Latin America, youths organized and participated in the 1918 Cordoba Reform protest movement that swept across all of Latin America to bring about changes in university governance. Subsequently, youth inclusion in university governance and leadership in African, Asian and Latin American countries was institutionalized in public universities.
In Western countries, the 1960s was a decade of tempestuous youth activism as they participated in United States civil rights movements, struggled against the Vietnam War and called for youth representation relatively in university decision-making processes. In European countries students and youth activism has been widespread, while in West Germany the youths organized an extra-parliamentary opposition to the regime. The major drivers of youth activism in the world in the 1960s were issues beyond national politics.
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Youth activism and SDGs
In 2015, the United Nations Congress adopted 17 SDGs for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The SDGs provide for the development of an action plan over the next decade to end outright poverty and put the world on the path to sustainability. The SDGs encapsulate three approaches to human well-being and growth, namely, economic development, environmental sustainability and social inclusion.
The UN has mapped the road to sustainable development by providing the framework, targets and indicators. The youths and students in general have a role to play in utilizing their creative ideas, technologies and inter-connectedness to bring innovativeness to the fascia in achieving the SDGs. Recently, African students participated in the Africa Students’ and Youth Summit 2018 (ASYS) that attracted thousands of students and youth to Kigali, Rwanda in 2018 to contribute towards the SDGs and African Union Agenda 2063.
Also, African students participated in a global protest under the banner of #ClimateAction in an international effort to offshoot world leaders into action on climate change. The youth and students all over the world took to the boulevards during a strike as part of a global day of student protests. They demanded action on climate change and criticized their governments for not taking global warming seriously as they should.
Social media engagements
Social media has been used to help mobilize the countless number of youths and students across the globe in what Manuel Castells would intellectualize as an internet-age networked movement. It aided the contribution of the youth movements to increasing access to quality higher education, providing decent work and economic growth, promoting gender equality, and reducing inequalities in countries. The South African students’ #FeesMustFall movement was yet further testimony to the role of youth and student activism in social transformation and in meeting the SDGs and Agenda 2063.
There are many ways in which students and the youth can fully, proactively and productively participate in discussions that focus on achieving SDGs by focusing on matters of national and global interest. No one should be left behind along the way. Governments should involve youth from diverse backgrounds in national-level planning, implementation, monitoring and executing. It is noted from the literature that students and youth can be regarded as critical thinkers, world builders, innovators and effective communicators. Moreover, they can be agents of change. Youth action can pressure governments to support the meaningful inclusion of students and youth in decision-making and achieving the SDGs.
Pressure groups involvement
Although the United Nations adopted 17 SDGs that set the world’s development agenda until 2030, these goals are not legally binding and each country can decide how to implement the ambitious goals based on their own national contexts. Furthermore, the review of a country’s progress toward its goals is strictly voluntary. In this framework, well-informed and organized youth engagement can play an important role in coercing, if not forcing political leaders and governments to pursue these goals seriously.
The SDGs can be achieved if governments recognize the value of collaborating and teaming up with students and youth as partners. Countries that develop clear pathways for meaningful involvement of students from the onset can be better positioned to achieve the SDGs and related targets. Relatively, these groups can exercise some authority through intensive education on the need to proportionate development and harness growth in all dimensions.
This assertion concurs with utterances by the former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon who postulated that no one can better understand the challenges at stake or the best way to respond to those challenges than youth. Accordingly, he made a call for students and youth to speak out on one hand and advised leaders and government to listen on the other. In conclusion, youth action can serve as pressure groups for meeting the SDGs. Through participation in dialogues or protest movements and by using social media tools to galvanize support, the youth can demand the implementation of sustainable development plans.
Higher education institutions have a significant role to play in advancing the SDGs through well-articulated youth voices in communities and on campuses as a lever of social and economic movements. This can include embracing the innovative ideas of the youths for societal development, promoting technological tools at their disposal, and supporting and nurturing youth actions by imparting to and inculcating in them certain skills and values as part of capacity building for developmental processes.
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