This June 15, 2021 event gathered high-level government officials, policy makers, youth-led organisations, and social entrepreneurs from the MENA region and OECD countries to discuss prospects for a more youth-responsive future post-COVID-19.
The OECD presented new regional comparative evidence and recommendations from its Youth Reviews of Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia. In interactive sessions, government officials and young people envisaged a post-COVID-19 world, in which policies, programs, and services are more responsive to their needs; young people have an active stake in decisions that affect their future and current governance challenges to their participation in economic, social, and public and political life are removed. Participants also discussed how to get there – based on an exchange of good practices and lessons learned.
To build a resilient recovery for youth after COVID-19, participants highlighted the need to:
- Adopt an integrated approach to delivering policies, programs, and services to young people.
- Build administrative capacity among the ministries in charge of youth affairs in the design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of youth policy and programmes at central and subnational levels.
- Anticipate the challenges and trends that will impact on the wellbeing of youth and future generations.
- Empower youth in building resilience through the collection and use of open data, the design of national volunteering programmes and respective legal frameworks, peer-to-peer training programmes in the field of sustainable development; and the creation of youth advisory bodies in areas such as climate policy.