Youth Employment Network

Thanks to the World Bank having an unsecured wireless network, I can blog live from the meeting here 🙂

I figured it might be useful to give some background to what these meetings are all about, and why I am attending!

The Youth Employment Network was established bt the UN, ILO and World Bank to help produce strategies, action plans and assistance plans to improve youth employment outcomes globally.

Two groups have been set up to assist the three organisations with this. A high level panel and a youth consultative group. The purpose of both is to critique and give input into the plans of the three bodies, so as to make them more effective. A real public-private partnership.

The high level panel includes the International Organisation of Employers, the Int Confederation of Free Trade Unions, a former EU Director-General and the Secretary-General of the International Chamber of Commerce.

The youth consultative group is also a representative body with reps from a dozen global youth organisations serving on it, including the three main political groupings being the International Young Democrat Union, the International Federation of Liberal Youth and the International Union of Socialist Youth.

We all met on Sunday evening and it was only at the end of the night, that we swapped names of whom we represent, and ironically I had spent most of the time getting on well with the IUSY rep. This sort of issue doesn’t tend to be overly partisan (we all agree more youth employment is good) but of course we disagree on the methods sometimes.

There is a huge mound of background reading for the meetings, and today (Monday) we had our first meeting at 6.30 am and won’t be finishing until after 7.00 pm so it is not just sit back for an easy time.

So far the meeting has been good. Rather than just rubber stamping stuff, there has been some significant criticisms which will lead to changes. The President of the World Bank is coming back tomorrow to hear our wishlist!

I still have quite a bit of work to do back in NZ which means keeping in touch with people during the evening. Unfortunately the NZ evening is from 2 am to 6 am Washington time so sleep once again is rare.