A "YES" decade of campaign of action for Youth Employment

A "Yes" Decade Campaign of Action" has been launched to ensure that "an additional 500 million young adults, especially youth facing poverty, will have productive and sustainable livelihoods by the year 2012."

The Decade Campaign of Action is promoting awareness raising about Youth Employment through a framework of action, which focuses on employability, equal opportunities for young men and women, entrepreneurship and employment creation, environmental stability and empowerment. It seeks to "develop innovative and effective youth employment initiatives" particularly through partnerships between youth and other stakeholders. There might be opportunities for national Thematic Groups of the UN System Network on Rural Development and Food Security to support the national Youth Employment Summit Networks established after the conference.

This Decade of action has been launched after the "Youth Employment Summit" which gathered youth and representatives of youth organizations, governments, corporations, non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations in Alexandria, Egypt, September 10-11, 2002, to address the obstacles to employment that are being faced by young people in the world. The goal of this Summit was to stimulate and inspire the development of programs and policies world wide to ensure that youth have access to education and training programs, skill-development opportunities, resources, and credit to build productive and sustainable livelihoods.

Other outcomes from the Summit were a State of Youth Employment Report 2002 outlining the problem of youth unemployment, the launch of a Global Knowledge Resources for Youth employment on Youth Employment and the Summit Declaration. You can also see FAO's Rural Youth Development webpage.