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The third annual Migration Youth Forum took place virtually on the 4th – 6th of January 2021 as the official youth preparatory space for the XIII Summit of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) chaired by the United Arab Emirates. In addition to the three-day event in January, the Forum’s Agenda included preparatory workshops during the month of December, and the Inaugural Youth Leadership and Innovation Award, demonstrating young people’s leadership and partnership potential. The top 3 initiatives won a combined $33,000.
We led extensive regional consultations (with 145 youth-led organizations operating in 79 countries, representing 88.000 youth) and roundtables at the Youth Forum, where young people developed policy briefs summarizing the youth position and proposals in relation to the GFMD themes. The Youth Forum gathered 96 young people leading work on migration and development issues in 51 countries to consolidate youth priorities and compile youth-led solutions to deliver concrete solutions to stakeholders at the GFMD Summit and beyond. After this preparatory space, 100 young people participated in all of the GFMD Summit and activities, including as speakers, facilitators, and presenters.
The virtual event was organized by the Major Group for Children and Youth (MGCY), in partnership with IOM and UNICEF and supported by the Governments of the Swiss Confederation and the United Arab Emirates.
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Thematic Roundatables
We needed clear documents compiling the priorities, positions, contributions and recommendations of young people, which would lend themselves to being used as the basis for youth advocacy with other stakeholders. We also needed to collect and highlight good practices and youth-led actions and solutions around the world, to facilitate action-and partnership-oriented recommendations at the Summit. For this reason, we created six 2-hour thematic roundtables, to jointly draft and agree on a one-page outcome document detailing young people’s inputs.
Regional Roundtables
The regional roundtables were designed to discuss the state of public narratives on migration and migrants in each region – Africa, Asia and Pacific, Europe, Latin America, MENA, and North America – in order to brainstorm on how the participants could work together to promote integration and evidence based narratives regionally. The participants created personal and collective action plans for 2021 outlining their planned goals, concrete activities, timelines, and collaboration networks.
MYCP is part of the Major Group for Children and Youth (MGCY) – the official, formal and self-organised space for children and youth (aged below 30) to contribute to and engage in certain intergovernmental and allied policy processes at the UN since 1992. Our mission is to bridge children and youth and the UN system, with a focus on migration issues, in order to ensure that their right to meaningful participation is realised. We do so by engaging children and youth entities in formal and informal forms in the design, implementation, monitoring, follow-up and review of sustainable development policies at all levels in four areas: Policy & Advocacy, Capacity Building, Youth Action and Knowledge.
