SDGs Youth summit

Are you  ready for this?

With youths from 10 states gathering to share their firsthand experiences on issues surrounding the MDGs and pointing out their passionate expectations as the SDGs commences, the SDGsNG Youth Meet-Up was nothing but a dynamic success. I also want to confirm to you that, that little effort we all cooked have actually generated a lot of discussions online and in major relevant offices.

 The difference between our gathering and the many others that also came up around the country was that we were practical and realistic. We reported our own story without been doctored or manipulated. We didn’t bring in guest that would intimidate us with official statistical data. We took responsibility and ownership of everything.

Now the word trades are over, we are going to work. Our collective desire now should focus on all the loopholes we discovered went wrong with the implementation processes of MDGs. Another serious area we will be advocating against is selective support both by government and the UN agencies. We cannot move forward by been selective and bias in selecting personal friends and organizations to work with. Unfortunately, the close allies they work with stays around the cities or probably don’t even come around Nigeria, but they represent us and they write false stories on our behalf. This we should sharply act against while working hard to posses the Global Goals.

I have stayed online this few days, to monitor the proceeding at the UN General Assembly. The world has declared their support for newly adopted SDGs just as they did for MDGs, but this said support is but a declaration. Beyond declaration, at our end we here we need to posses the Goals particularly for actions.

Have you decided on a Goal to monitor?

You necessarily don’t have to found and NGO. You can volunteer with one or simply become a freelance project reporter. As discussed, our performance report for SDGs should not be based on the cities. Let’s take time out to visit rural communities and talk to their chiefs, village heads, youths and children/women to find out truthful situations to report and take live pictures of projects, make videos with our phones and share them around on social media. Only that we should do all in sincerity.

We succeeded in setting up 5 groups along the five Ps of the Global Goals and these groups have been working greatly. Base on our desire to drive visible change and transformation, the 31^st of October 2015 is at the moment considered to be our Nigerian Youth Group’s Summit on SDGs. We hope this summit will be convenient for the UN SDGs office to attend and other relevant organizations, but each group will be coming to present to us all, what their plans are and how they plan to posses the Goals with marching actions. Let the government for the first time notice the new force of and drive in us.