Joshua Alade is the convener of the newly formed Nigerian Youth SDGs Network, a coalition of youth focused and you-led organizations working around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Nigeria.
He tells ADAM ALQALI the vision of the Network which is aimed at it making youth participate in the implementation of the SDGs in Nigeria
What can you say inspired you to start the Nigerian Youth SDGs Network? We started the Nigerian Youth SDGs Network having realized the need for a framework to monitor youth’s work towards the successful realization of the Sustainable Development Networks (SDGs) in Nigeria.
We realized that for us to work towards achieving the SDGs we needed to have youth organizations working to create enough data on the SDGs and being able to engage with the government to monitor eff orts being made to actualize the SDGs.
For the fi rst time, we want to have young people working around the SDGs Nigeria come under one platform and speak with one voice.
The Network is still very young, how has the journey been so far? We are barely a month old as network but the work on creating it commenced in January, 2017, we now have about 50 youth organizations registered on the network and our goal is to have between 100 and 200 organizations by December 2017.
And we hope to formally launch it in January 2018. We have many organizations coming to ask what the network will off er them in terms of gains for their work; it is challenging explaining what exactly is the mandate of the Network is because right now we don’t have funding for the Network and other things necessary to make it function well.
However, we have been able to make them understand one thing: that it is possible for us to have one voice as youth organizations working around the SDGs in Nigeria and it has been interesting as Nigerian youth have been embracing the Network across the country, from Port Harcourt to Lagos, Ibadan Abuja, Uyo and Jos, everyone is understanding that we need a youth coalition for the SDGs in Nigeria.
The Network has successfully hosted the fi rst ever Nigerian Youth SDGs Summit last August in Lagos, and which had delegates from across Nigeria and even abroad.
What was that experience like? It was awesome! We never knew we could do it but we had to do it because I always tell my team that if there is anything that is supposed to be done and you have young people in charge they can make it happen.
We were able to get the support of development organizations within Nigeria and outside it.
Many of the delegates confi rmed that the summit was the fi rst time they were coming to an event where it was entirely young people not only listening to their fellow young people but also sharing ideas about each other’s work to inspire each other and explore opportunities for collaborations.
The idea behind the Nigerian Youth SDGs Network is to give the youth the opportunity to participate in the implementation of the SDGs, why is it necessary to have youth participating in the process? Because young people have the largest population in the world; the world is young and if you are talking about the next 13 years of the SDGs you are talking about the future of young people.
As a youth, if you are 15 years old today you will be approaching 30 by 2030 and if you are 25 today by 2030 you will be approaching 40.
Th is is why young people need to have an active role and be at the forefront of the implementation of the SDGs.
Moreover, the SDGs are important to the youth because they are about the kind of world young people will live in in the next 13 years; we have been saying there is poverty everywhere in Africa and the continent has so many young people yet most of these youth are unemployed.
We also have high maternal mortality rates and these are the issues that young people can help to address, we are in a position to create better solutions for these challenges.
Th erefore, it is the work of the coalition to make the youth know about the goals.
Th e fact is that there are many young people working to address the SDGs even though they don’t necessarily know about the SDGs.
For example, there are many young people working around providing access to education in rural communities yet they don’t know about the SDGs so we need to make them understand the link between their work and the goals.
By raising awareness about the goals youth will become better informed to be able to make decisions about the specifi c goals they care about.
What is your vision for the SDGs in terms of future plans for the Network in terms of creating more awareness about the Network among Nigerian youth? Right now we already have a structure for the coalition and we are inviting organizations that are interested to also come on board.
We want to hold stakeholder events across diff erent states, we want to be able to monitor the implementation of the goals, and we want to be able to fund organizations that are part of the Network to work around specifi c goals.
We want to have the opportunity to make demands directly to government because we the youth know better what works for us than anyone else, because someone who is 60 years old cannot relate with the reality of things as they relate to the youth in 2017 but someone who is 20 years old can do so.
For example, although the issue of access to technology could be part of basic education, it is mainly the youth that can understand and relate to this.