The Youth Empowerment Synergy (YES-Ghana) with the support of United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Ghana office initiates the project “Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Youth Action Campaign” across the country.

The campaign aims at providing opportunities for youth leadership and active participation in the national effort towards achieving the SDGs.

The campaign is structured to increase ownership and awareness of these goals among young people in Ghana and increase youth-led, evidence-based advocacy for critical issues affecting them.

Mr. Emmanuel Edudzie the Executive Director, YES-Ghana said “YES-Ghana believes the time is right for young people to become the leaders of development.

The launch of the SDGs provides a generational opportunity for young people to become leaders in decision making, and to take part in the design, implementation, and monitoring of the development framework that will directly affect their lives”.

Touching on activities structured for the initiative, (Mr. Edudzie) said “As part of the campaign, YES-Ghana has a selected list of activities slated from June 2017 to August 2018 to engage the youth.

These include selection of participating schools, development of youth academies and youth projects, hosting of youth forums, creation and revitalization of youth clubs and running a national essay competition.

These activities will culminate with a national youth conference on the SDGs”.

The Youth Empowerment Synergy (YES-Ghana) is an ECOSOC-accredited non-governmental organization at the forefront of youth development policy, practice and research in Ghana.

A team from YES-Ghana was sent to the just ended African regional forum on sustainable development in Addis Ababa, where they took part in a preparatory and capacity-development workshop for major groups and other stakeholders in the African region.

At the workshop, they went through capacity-building activities meant to strengthen the participation in and ownership of development processes by diverse communities, in particular at the national, subnational and local levels.

They returned to the country poised to kick-start the SDGs youth action campaign.