UN: International Year of Youth

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a long-term supporter and now patron of Restless Development, the international youth-led development agency. I am also an advisory board member of the Global Poverty Project, the aim of which, through education and training, is to increase the number and effectiveness of people taking action so that we will see a world without extreme poverty within a generation.

I have two or three simple messages. First, I have an abhorrence of waste. Whether it is wasting money, food, electricity, water or even wasting time, I cannot abide it in my own life or in society generally. The statistics set out so clearly by my noble friend Lady Morris of Bolton incensed me. We talk glibly about a waste of natural resources in our world, yet the waste of so many hundreds of millions of young lives—a so-called lost generation whose potential is unfilled through no fault of their own—is rarely mentioned. Young people are human beings; they are also assets and potentially the most valuable resource in our world today. They have ideas, they have energy and they deserve a future.

By investing in these young people we have the opportunity to break entrenched cycles of poverty and inequity. There is an undeniable economic case for investing in children and youth today. As UNICEF’s 2011 The State of the World’s Children report states:

“The economic and social progress of nations depends upon harnessing the potential, energy and skills of these young people”.

A recent World Bank report says, specific to Uganda,

“if girls with only a primary education finished secondary school, over their working lives they would contribute economic benefits to their country equivalent to one-third of current year GDP”.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, said, educated girls are less likely to marry early and less likely to become pregnant as teenagers. They are also more likely to understand the benefits of nutrition and to have healthy children when they become mothers. They are also more likely then to send those children to school.

What can be done and what can we do? I would like to talk briefly about my experience with Restless Development, having seen at first hand its commitment to working with and through young people in Zambia. Its approach is to train young national volunteers to teach in their schools and communities. Increasingly, it is also working to get Governments and international agencies to recognise that to achieve sustainable success in poverty reduction it is essential to meaningfully engage young people in the process. As I visited several schools in outlying communities in the back of beyond, I was struck by the potency of training young Zambians to provide peer education on livelihoods, leadership and sexual and reproductive health. Messages which older teachers and parents would struggle to get across were readily accepted. I was inspired, too, by the other consequence of training peer educators—that they themselves became young leaders who in due course would go into communities as role models.

I mentioned earlier my abhorrence of waste and my commitment to highlighting the needs of poor young people. As part of this—I hope noble Lords will forgive this advertorial—I will be participating in the Live Below the Line campaign championed by Christian Aid, Restless Development, the Salvation Army and other charities. This will involve me and—I am delighted to note—the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, and a number of other colleagues from the House, including the Lord Speaker, living for five days on £1 a day for food and drink. Again, like the International Year of Youth, the aim is to put a spotlight on the lives of 1.4 billion people, half of them young people, who live off this meagre amount every day of their lives.

We all have a responsibility to raise public awareness on this issue and to help those who are working to bring about change. One thing that struck me from my time in Zambia was that whatever poverty young Zambians endured, there is no poverty of ambition. A lesson, perhaps, for some in this country.