National gender youth advocates
UN Women
Stolen Dreams and the Youth For Freedom Collective were nominated to act as UN Women National Gender Youth Advocates (NGYAs). Our mandate involves centring gender equality and the full, effective, meaningful and substantive participation and leadership of youth, in all our diversity, in efforts, decision-making and intergovernmental processes across the UN system, and beyond.
About the UN Women National Gender Youth Advocates (NGYAs):
The UN Women National Gender Youth Advocates (NGYAs) is a global network of over 300 young people working with UN Women and stakeholders to empower youth, especially young women and girls, in all our diversity, through an intergenerational, intersectional approach, focusing on shifting social norms, supporting policy change, fostering women and girls’ leadership, and amplifying their voices through effective partnerships.
The network was launched during UN Women’s Generation Equality Forums in 2021 and continues to act as the powerhouse behind youth participation and leadership across the Generation Equality Agenda, UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), and ensuring gender equality is centred across the entire UN system and its processes and mechanisms.
Our Work with UN Women:
The Transforming Education Summit is being convened by the United Nations in response to a global crisis in education – one of equity and inclusion, quality and relevance.
Often slow and unseen, this crisis is having a devastating impact on the futures of children and youth worldwide.
The Summit provides a unique opportunity to elevate education to the top of the global political agenda and to mobilize action, ambition, solidarity and solutions to recover pandemic-related learning losses and sow the seeds to transform education in a rapidly changing world.
As UN Women National Gender Youth Advocates (NGYAs), we carried out grassroots consultations and conversations, collating inputs and suggestions on how gender equality and gender-transformative education can be centred across the Transforming Education Summit processes.
Read the recommendations in full below.
On 6 June the President of the General Assembly (PGA) H.E. Ambassador Abdulla Shahid, appointed H.E. Ambassador Yoka Brandt, Permanent Representative of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and H.E. Ambassador Satyendra Prasad, Permanent Representative of Fiji, as co-facilitators of the Declaration on [for] Future Generations.
To prepare for Summit of the Future, proposed in the Secretary General’s report “Our Common Agenda” to be held next year, the co-facilitators have been requested by the PGA to start consultations on the Declaration on Future Generations. This intergovernmental consultative process will endeavor to provide an “Elements Paper”, reflecting elements that capture what Member States and stakeholders would like to see reflected in the Declaration.
As youth, we have been directly engaging with Member States, by submitting our contributions throughout the consultation period (August 2022).
Below, you can read our collective submission as UN Women National Gender Youth Advocates (NGYAs) on the importance of centring gender equality across the Elements’ Paper.
In September 2023 the United Nations’ 193 member states are expected to convene a Summit of the Future during the General Assembly’s annual high-level week in New York City.
Between July and September 2022, Member States are negotiating the UN General Assembly resolution to decide the modalities for the Summit of the Future.
As youth, we have been directly engaging with Member States, sending them our language suggestions to try and influence the negotiation process.
Read the Youth Mark-Up to the zero draft text of the modalities resolution, and our intervention during the 22nd August 2022 stakeholder briefing with Member States below.
In Our Common Agenda, the Secretary-General issued an ambitious call to improve international cooperation through effective multilateralism. A central objective of effective multilateralism is strengthening governance arrangements that can deliver global public goods, a critical issue of international concern.
He announced the formation of a High-Level Advisory Board (HLAB) that will be tasked with developing an independent report in support of this objective. The report will reflect substantive research into effective multilateralism and global public goods and will contain concrete recommendations for the Secretary-General and Member States ahead of the 2023 Summit of the Future.
HLAB is led by a former Head of State and a former Head of Government and composed of other leaders from civil society, the private sector, academia, and other relevant arenas.
As part of the HLAB’s consultation process, as UN Women National Gender Youth Advocates, we contributed a submission on how multilateralism and governance across the UN system needs to be strengthen to advance gender equality.
Read the submission in full below.
The sixty-sixth session of the Commission on the Status of Women took place from 14 to 25 March 2022.
Priority theme: Achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in the context of climate change, environmental and disaster risk reduction policies and programmes.
The outcome of the Commission’s consideration of the priority theme during its 66th session will takes the form of agreed conclusions, negotiated by all Member States. The Commission on the Status of Women adopted agreed conclusions on “Achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in the context of climate change, environmental and disaster risk reduction policies and programmes” on 25 March 2022.
As youth, we directly engaged with Member States of the UN and successfully influenced the intergovernmental negotiations of the Agreed Conclusions, for the first time in CSW history.
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Member States who took the time to dialogue with us and advocated for our language suggestions in the negotiations.
Read the full CSW66 Agreed Conclusions below.
The Commission adopts multi-year programmes of work to appraise progress and make further recommendations to accelerate the implementation of the Platform for Action. These recommendations take the form of negotiated agreed conclusions on a priority theme. The Commission also contributes to the follow-up to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development so as to accelerate the realization of gender equality and the empowerment of women.
As youth, we directly engaged with Member States of the UN and successfully influenced the intergovernmental negotiations of the Methods of Work. For the first time in CSW history, youth are mentioned in the operative paragraphs of the outcome document, and a formal session facilitating dialogue between youth and Member States will be held from 2023 onwards.
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Member States who took the time to dialogue with us and advocated for our language suggestions in the negotiations.
Read the full CSW66 Methods of Work below.
Having carried out more than 25 community-level, youth-led consultations across six regions (North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe and Central Asia, Africa, South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), Asia and the Pacific regions), and building from the Agreed Conclusions Revision1 Working Text (published on 24th February), we have collated our inputs are delighted to share with you the CSW66 Global Youth Recommendations: Youth, Gender, and Climate.
This revised document of youth recommendations provides suggestions for additions and amendments to the language of the Working Text. If adopted, we envision that the CSW66 Agreed Conclusions will facilitate urgent and concrete climate action that centers women, girls, and youth, in all their diversities.
Read the full CSW66 Global Youth Recommendations: Youth, Gender and Climate below.
Having carried out community-level, youth-led consultations across six regions (North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe and Central Asia, Africa, South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), Asia and the Pacific regions), Stolen Dreams and the Youth For Freedom Collective collated inputs and submitted recommendations to Member States on the intersections between climate change, gender and contemporary forms of slavery and trafficking in persons. These recommendations also informed the Global Youth Recommendations.
All language regarding ‘modern slavery’ and ‘trafficking in persons’ seen in the final negotiated Agreed Conclusion (outcome document) of CSW66, was proposed by Stolen Dreams and the Youth For Freedom Collective.
We are grateful for the support of the Walk Free Foundation for reviewing the recommendations to ensure they are aligned with the most comprehensive and up-to-date research.
Read the full recommendations below.
The Generation Equality Forum (GEF) processes have had an ambitious vision and objective to accelerate progress towards gender equality and intersectional justice. They aim to fuel powerful and lasting Action Coalitions (ACs) to achieve transformative change for generations to come. Furthermore, it promises to be a civil society-driven process that centres young feminists, placing them in the “driving seat”. The GEF clearly acknowledges the crucial role youth plays in achieving its ambitious goals and realising its vision and objectives. However, the implementation of its ambitious vision is falling behind our expectations, particularly around these areas:
- Youth leadership and co-ownership
- Feminist leadership
- Intersectionality / intersectional approach
- Transformative design and leadership
This manifesto was developed by young activists in the context of the Generation Equality Forum (GEF). It was co-created through a participative process involving youth-led organizations participating as Action Coalition co-leaders, the Generation Equality Youth Task Force (YTF), young feminists from the global Civil Society Advisory Group (CSAG) and Mexican CSAG as well as the National Gender Youth Activists (NGYAs). It seeks to offer a young, intersectional feminist vision for the GEF and the ACs, as well as some concrete recommendations to positively impact the GEF/ACs and make it a truly feminist, transformative and intersectional space and process.
The fundamental principles of the Young Feminist Manifesto are also being used to transform other spaces across the UN system to truly secure the full, effective, meaningful and substantive participation and co-leadership of youth, in all our diversity.
Read the full Young Feminist Manifesto below.