Young activists question Deputy Prime Minister on world poverty

20 September 2010

A group of young people involved in Y Care International's Global Youth Work programme, met Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and the Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell to give them their views ahead of a major international summit on global poverty next week.

They discussed the Millennium Development Goals – the eight UN targets that aim to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015.

Y Care International is a member organisation of the DFID/CSO Working group. In August young people from Scotland took part in a special roadshow event organised by Y Care International where they learned about the MDGs and planned activities to run with their peers to share just how important these goals are.

The Y Care International team, who were part of a network of 30 organisations and young people in the UK working to help put young people at the heart of development, presented the ministers with two reports representing the views of 30,000 young people and showcased local development campaigns which highlight the MDGs. The discussions came ahead of the UN MDG Summit in New York taking place this week.

Jamie Lloyd, who attended the event said, “We are running our own activities on the MDGs in YMCAs in Scotland, so I wanted to ask how the ministers thought young people could help raise awareness, especially in terms of achieving universal primary education.”

Speaking at the meeting with young people, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said: “It was fantastic to meet these young people today who are working hard in their communities to highlight development issues.

“Unless young people engage with, understand and care about helping the world’s poorest, we are never going to achieve our ambitions to tackle world poverty. Equally it is imperative that we focus our efforts on young people abroad, in the countries we are trying to help. We need to create generations of young men and women who are healthy, educated, and empowered to create prosperity for their societies, taking their fates into their own hands.

Mr Clegg insisted he will be “putting a huge emphasis on the welfare of mothers and their children when I go to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals conference next week.”

Andrew Mitchell, International Development Secretary, said their top priorities at the summit are to save the lives of thousands of women who are dying in pregnancy and childbirth, and to do more to tackle malaria, a disease which causes nearly a million entirely preventable deaths every year.”