National Youth Policy and Advocacy
You raise an important point about familiarity with the Youth Policy/entrepreneurship policy. Many surveys conducted indicate that young people are not familiar with policies that directly affect them. It is prudent that, in this instance, youth policies are disseminated as extensively as possible so that as many young people understand programmes and interventions in place to support them and how best to access opportunities available for assistance. Do young people in your respective countries know whether there exist policies/plans to support them in their entrepreneurship ventures?
Nellie, I agree perfectly with you that most young people are not familiar with policies that directly affect them. I am happy with submissions of our Nigerian colleagues who say their ministry started the distribution of the policy last year,awaiting the implementation of the content.My biggest hope is that, the policy would be read by the youth to the latter. In the case of Ghana, the policy after been launched in 2010, was put on the internet for easy access by everyone. It was is available on the government portal on the internet. Reading contributes largely to our knowledge base but it is something most youth hardly do.--Kafuiaheto 18:05, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
Experience in my Youth policy advocacy is very humble. I serious got engaged in the issues of advocacy when i was at a University representative for the International Forestry Student Association(IFSA)in Zambia . At this time though not very firm advocated for the youth participation in the management and utilization of natural resources at policy level coordinating activities that would influence policy decisions and demand. This initiative how ever could only be done half way through and it was abandoned because of lack of political will from the stakeholders involved. Two year later i was elected Copper belt University MDG Student Chapter president and hosted a series of activities aimed at pressuring government to prioritize issues of the MDGs in all the sectors of the economy as stipulated in MDG Charter of 2000. This events were so successful that the United National Millennium Campaign Policy Ad visor for Africa demanded to be part of the movement to deliver the petition on Behalf of the students to Government. Same of our demands were included in some of the policy documents that are being used today.(among them Fifth National Development Plan).During the same year advocated for enactment of the policy that reprimands people who deliberately infect young people with the virus. The list is endles. MDG Campaign Program Manager ....i will comment more later sorry iam going into a meeting
This a very important issue and i agree with most of the contributions especially from Zambia, in teams of having a the National Youth Policy, however i strongly think that for the Zambia of African countries to create enabling environments for youth entrepreneurship it must be beyond having a National Youth Policy and the Action planes. we need to start creating the enabling environment by promoting Entrepreneurship in schools so that the youth grow up with the motivation of creating jobs.
