UN-HABITIAT views young people as effective advocates of change and sees them as catalysts in making a difference on the ground. It is within this spirit that UN-HABITAT, under the scope of it Global Partnership Initiative (GPI) for Urban Youth Development in Africa, engages youth and youth organizations in order to develop a strategy to engage them in human settlements work and programmes.

The Global Alliance for ICT and Development ( GAID), is organizing a Global Forum on Youth and ICT for Development: Youth and ICT as an agent of change, that will help harness the creativity and dynamism that the youth has in exploring and exploiting ICT for their own benefit and for the benefit of their peers and communities in advancement of the United Nations Millennium Development goals (MDGs). The forum aims at actively engaging youth in debates and discussions with peers representatives,policy makers,private sector, technology and thought leaders and other in exploring ways to empower the community and to participate more fully in society through appropriate and responsible use of ICT

UN-HABITAT will host a round table session at the Conference that will focus on Youth, ICT and Governance. This session will bring together youth as well as representatives from the eCities alliance including the United Cities Local Government, Oracle, Cities Alliance, the World Bank, UN-HABITAT, USAID, the City of Dubai and Tejari to discuss and map out strategies on how young people can be effectively integrated into eGovernance processes for better planning and development of policies and programmes for the running of cities. The session will specifically highlight the eCities programme’s City to Youth (C2Y) initiative, which focuses on engaging young citizens in the process of governance of their cities as well as in building their capacity to fully engage their mayors and city officials through ICT. An overall aim of the session, is to demonstrate how the City to Youth programme can support cities, youth parliaments and youth councils to design and implement eTools that integrate young people and their concerns into eGovernace processes, and where necessary, provide technology and tools for the same.

E-governance and its forms of e-democracy are opportunities for change in the near future. Technology, if well used, powers interactions and is also an excellent agent to reform the relationship between the public and private sectors, as well as an opportunity to generate virtual interaction. This is more so with the most important segment of the urban population, the youth. While taking advantage of the lack of universal access, technology can be used to create a base for virtual participatory models in real and interactive parallel worlds. This could involve the adoption of new roles and instruments in which the local authority, maybe the most important player in urban governance, no longer occupies a central role.

EXPECTED OUTCOME:

The overall expected outcome of this event is the development of strategies to engage and integrate young people and their concerns through ICT
and eGoverance into the decision and policy making processes related to the running of cities. UN-HABITAT expects to launch the Global Youth
Technology Challenge towards this end. This initiative will serve as a vehicle for the young citizens of the world’s cities to develop strategies,
programmes and mobilize resources to eliminate the digital divide, while working towards improving the quality of life and poverty alleviation in their
respective cities. By uniting the two strong enablers of urban development, youth and technology, cities create a constituency to:

Communicate with other cities, creating a network of youth more connected, better trained, empowered with new ideas for urban development
Improve the reach, physically and with the use of technology of essential social services like child care, education, information dissemination on health, water, opportunities and training tools in the most vulnerable areas i.e. slums, orphanages and other temporary settlements
Creates the on-line lobby for youth as stakeholders in their own future, giving them a collective voice towards participating in the strategic plan for their future and therefore the future of their cities.
The forum findings and recommendations will be summarized into a report, which will be presented at the plenary session of the GAID. As a follow up to the GAID UN-HABITAT will feed round table outcomes into the planning of the World Urban Forum IV, which will be held in Nanjing, China in 2008.

Instructions:
The E consultation will take place over 3 weeks from the 27 August to the 15 September, 2007.

Every Monday, two questions will be posted on the discussion forum youth page http://www.unhabitat.org/forum/default.asp?catid=463 and participants are requested to respond to the questions on the forum stating their experiences, best practices and recommendations.

The moderator will summarize the discussions of the previous week and send a report to all subscribers by Tuesday of the following week.
Kindly focus your comments on the discussion topic.

When you communicate on the forum, please introduce yourself, country and the organization.

Im curently working on modertrating this eforum and this is one opportunity that a young person has been given and am going to show case how young peole can help make things move when given an opportunity