Proving that young women and young men are a force to be reckoned with, participants in the first-ever Youth Forum at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) embraced their active engagement in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and in CSW60, the single-largest intergovernmental gathering on women and girls, the UN reports:
The two-day forum, from 11–12 March—organized by UN Women, YWCA, the UN Inter-agency Network on Youth Development’s Working Group on Youth and Gender Equality and partners—drew over 300 participants from across the globe who stressed that young people are in the driver’s seat and they’re ready to achieve gender equality.
“This is a defining moment when women and youth make an alliance… with the potential to change the world,” said UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka (above), in her opening remarks on the first day, as she launched UN Women’s Youth and Gender Equality Strategy.
“Everybody here has something engaging and critical to bring to the table. There was a lot of emphasis on inclusion—making sure we’re taking into consideration minority voices, just looking beyond the binaries of sexuality and gender. Those types of issues are central to the work that we ought to be doing here because none of this makes sense; none of this is worth it if we are leaving these key voices out,” said 26-year-old participant Danielle Agyemang, of the National Endowment for Democracy.
