Sunny day in Stockholm-but it is getting cold. Before starting to work this morning, I went for a good walk to the hills in the southern part of the city, "Söder", as it is called: Old, narrow streets, described by the Stockholm writer Per Anders Fogelström as the most beautiful in the whole city, with great views over the Old Town.
Good were also the news coming from New York. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban-Ki Moon, recognized in a speech that Children and Women need to be a priority if we are going to move forward in at least partially fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals. He even promised money, some 40 million dollars, for this purpose. Ban Ki-moon also recognized young people as being a critical part of the population by stating that:
“It is increasingly clear that economic infrastructure and productive capacity-building hold the key to generating decent jobs, especially for the large youth populations of these countries”.
As I wrote earlier, there is a momentum gathering for the advancement of youth rights in the world, a momentum being created not out of niceness, but out of necessity. The world will move towards a breaking point if we do not understand that concrete measures need to be taken, starting by the realization of the situation of young people, continuing with policy making and legal recognition and of course implementation and enforcement mechanisms. When it comes to youth, the facts are clear. In Africa and the Middle East, hundreds of millions of young people are likely to face unemployment and poverty-it does not take a big strategic brain to understand that this not only a human social&economic disaster, but also a security threat.
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