Conscious paradigm shift key for youth to realise potential

Another International Youth Day is around the corner. Nineteen years ago, next week, the United Nation’s General Assembly endorsed a recommendation made in Lisbon, Portugal, the previous year that August 12 should be nominated the International Youth Day. In a sense, the 1998 and 1999 focus on young people was not anything new. For, already, in 1985 the UN marked what it called the International Year of the Youth.

In the manner of speaking, the world has gone through 33 solid years of some kind of collective focus on what we may want to call the Youth Agenda. It is instructive that the 1985 celebration of young people came in the wake of the carnival that was the first UN Decade for Women in Nairobi. Two demographics that have traditionally been marginalised, therefore, were in prominent focus. It is questionable, however, that the world has progressively addressed these demographics.