Founder & Executive Director Inspire Liberia Project, LIBERIA
Mr. Emmanuel N. B. Flomo has an MBA in Public Finance and is the 2015 Winner of the Future Africa Award Prize for Youth in Public Service, Lagos, Nigeria. He has contributed to youth development work in Liberia and Africa for over 15 years. Mr. Flomo was elected as Vice President for Liberia National Student Union (LINSU), which serves as the umbrella organization for all students in Liberia. In 2013, he was also selected to the Technical Youth Team of Former Liberian President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Program called the President ‘s Young Professional Program. Mr. Flomo is the Founder & Executive Director of The Inspire Liberia Project, an institution in Liberia working to promote youth empowerment through community civic engagement, community empowerment, and to increase indigenous participation in decision making in Liberia.
Event Title:Advancing Youth through Social and Economic Empowerment
Date: September 25, 2019
SPEECH
Let me first acknowledge the hard work, and extend my thanks, to Cemre Ulker and the President for Journalist and Writer Foundation, Mr. Mehmet Kilic for this initiative and for affording me the opportunity to moderate this prestigious panel. In that respect, I am happy to welcome everyone, to Panel 2 discussion with a focus on Advancing Youth through Social and Economic Empowerment.
Young people are a significant segment of the global population index and critical to the social and economic development of any country. Today, there are over 1.2 billion young people aged 15 to 24 years; indicating that Young people are key. We can play a significant role in enhancing global social and economic development and change if we are given the opportunity. Some progress has been made in many Countries in advancing Youth Development, but the challenges in the process are still overwhelming in many parts of our globe.
Many of the progress so far in youth development is overwhelmingly credited to developed nations, while developing nations are far from near giving serious attention to these issues. For example, the European Commission considers that “Europe’s future prosperity depends on its young people and thus deserve particular support and consideration as well as seeks to strengthen people’s current and future capacities and improve their opportunities to participate in society” (EC European Policy brief, 2014). Such a policy like this is vital for Youth Social Advancement and Empowerment, but the step taken by the EU is yet acknowledged or cheer in the entire continent of Africa.
Africa which the youth population is estimated to be one-third of the world population today is behind when it comes to youth social advancement and empowerment. The youth of the continent is poor; education and access to jobs have been challenged. This figure and the lack of progress in youth development in Africa posed a tremendous global threats to the SDGs if African leaders and the young people are not proactively engaged.
As part of the engagement effort, I have made continuous advocacies in Liberia with emphasis on the national frameworks that promote a productive workforce and creating opportunities that could allow the youth to make a significant contribution to nation-building. Young people should be empowered and motivated to consider political leadership as a means to serve their nation and should be oriented on anti-corruption drives with a focus on prevention, education, and strategies for fighting corruption and restoring economic development.
Well-developed skills can be equated to long-lasting empowerment and sustainable growth. When we take critical development steps, a huge to the reduction in the rural and urban gap becomes visible and appreciable by the society and its people. Young people represent courage, wisdom, and energy, the will-power to do good, they are able to take leadership that would make the difference. Their energy and understanding must be respected, guided and built for future roles.
Executive Director, Center for SDG Global Education
Event Title: Inclusive Social Development in Achieving the Global Goals 2030
Date: September 25, 2019
SPEECH
Since the Post-2015 Era, the Center for SDG Global Education has focused on “Education Solutions in Community Classrooms” along the SDG Goal # 4 and the its targets in the Global Agenda 2030. In the course of our reach, we observed that quality education and inclusion for lifelong learning seems far fetched in communities in developing countries. Most communities still lack a curriculum on educational technology and technological facilities, qualified teachers and standard teaching and learning infrastructure. In communities with opportunities and facilities for quality education, educational practices begin with a complex curriculum that focuses on what children do not know but what they know. This hinders quality education, which is expected that SDG Goal # 4 and its targets will address globally by leaving no one behind.
In addition, we launched Barr Juni and Irene Endowment Trust to raise $80,000 to help provide schools in the Community Rehabilitation Scheme, scholarships, introduce visiting teacher services to community classrooms and Global Teacher Classroom.
We are committed to these initiatives that will help achieve the Global Agenda 2030. In addition, these initiatives will support partnerships between stakeholders and UN agencies to address quality and inclusive education in community classrooms in developing countries.
As we digress on the input from the 74th Session of the UNGA, it is pertinent to focus on the addendum that the community classrooms have an urgent need to improve the quality of education and the level of teaching and learning to meet the demands of SDG Goal # 4 and its target globally.
Professor United States International University, KENYA
Dr. Macharia Munene is a professor of History and International Relations at the United States International University in Nairobi, obtained his doctorate in Diplomatic History in 1985 from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. Dr. Munene has served as Collaborating International Faculty, Universitat Jaume-1, Castellon, and Professorial Affiliate of the National Defence College, Karen, Nairobi, Kenya. He also taught at the University of Nairobi, where he was Chairman of the Department, Kenyatta University, Moi University, The Ohio State University, Kentucky State University, and Ohio University. Dr. Munene has also served as an External Examiner at the University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University, Masinde Muliro University, and Egerton University. Dr. Munene is recognized as a public intellectual and resource person. He has received the United Nations recognition as an Expert on Decolonisation. He is also rated among the Top 100 CCTV-4 commentators in the world. And, appears in Kenyan and global media and public forums as an observer, analyst, and columnist. Dr. Munene also serves as an Advisor to the Harmony Institute in Nairobi, Kenya.
Event Title: Inclusive Social Development in Achieving the Global Goals 2030
Writer at Dawn Newspaper, Falak Sufi Scholar 2018, NYU, PAKISTAN
Moneeza Burney is associated with several social projects in Pakistan related to youth empowerment and poverty alleviation through education and creative content development. Working as a script writer, a freelance journalist, and leading youth programs of her own, Moneeza has served as a Director of the Lahore Students Union (LSU), a platform for youth community service and social leadership, which has placed over 1,000 students across a network of 75+ partner NGOs, social projects and civil society initiatives since 2014. In the summer of 2019, she has visited Beirut, Lebanon to share ideas with local NGOs about youth engagement for conflict resolution and empowerment through creative methods. Moneeza continues to write for DAWN newspaper in Pakistan, for whom she has worked as a feature writer since 2013. Moneeza is currently a graduate student at New York University in the Near Eastern Studies program as a Falak Sufi Scholar 2018, and holds a BA (Hons) degree from Sheffield Hallam University, UK, in Business Economics.
Event Title: Inclusive Social Development in Achieving the Global Goals 2030
Date: September 25, 2019
SPEECH
The role of youth in creating inclusive social societies
Respected representatives, I’m honored to address this conference about the role of youth in creating inclusive societies. For the last 6 years I have had the privilege to be a youth program organizer in my home town of Lahore, Pakistan, and have personally managed over 1,000 youth volunteers across a partner network of over 75 NGOs, social projects and civil society organizations. Through the platforms I run, I have been able to closely observe young people of varying ethnicities, religions, genders, and economic classes come together to improve the lives of those less fortunate than them, or collaborate to tackle problems that are meaningful to them at a deeply personal level. I’d like to share one such experience with you today.
In 2013, Dr. Ali Haider, a well-known eye doctor in Lahore, was assassinated for the sole crime of being a Shia Muslim, one of Pakistan’s many religious and sectarian minorities who have been systematically targeted by radical religious militant groups. Murdered alongside him in cold blood was his 11 year old son, Murtaza, who was on his way to school. They are just two of over 70,000 Pakistani civilians killed as a result of violent extremism since 9/11, the forgotten domestic casualties of the world’s war on terror and the rise of global militancy. The platform I work with was created a month later, with the hope of organizing and encouraging the youth to take back their culture, their country, and their religion from those who misuse it to spread evil and hatred across the world. I started a program called the Community Service Initiative to let students learn how to be responsible citizens, realize their obligation to give back to society, and strive to improve the lives of those who can’t help themselves. Over the last 6 years, through this program, I have organized youth volunteer programs for an organization run by the widow of the late Dr Ali Haider, and watched students from all backgrounds, Sunni, Shia, Christian, Punjabi, Pakhtun, Sindhi, Hazara, Male and Female, come together to spread religious tolerance and help the survivors and victims of violent crimes. When a bombing took place in a park on Easter Sunday in 2016, these volunteers came together to organize storytelling and art sessions for children in hospital wards, collect financial assistance for families to bear their medical costs, arrange prosthetic limbs for patients who could never be whole again after the tragedy, or sometimes simply pay the utility bills for families who had never had to survive without their primary breadwinner. When not working on such projects, the volunteers visit churches, temples, mosques of different sects, all to prove that people of varying faiths and beliefs can still peacefully coexist in a society built on equality, freedom, and mutual respect.
In an increasingly polarized world, we often think of the layers of religious, ethnic, and cultural identity as problematic, it is my personal experience that when young people from diverse backgrounds and experiences unite towards a noble purpose, their efforts take on a multiplier effect. Our personal traits and histories play a huge role in defining the world we live in and the challenges we face, and are an undeniable part of our human experience. But when we acknowledge our differences without judgment, we recognize that these only make us stronger, more complete, and more able to tackle complex problems as a cohesive whole rather than from just our limited point of reference. I have seen student volunteers who are embarrassed by their less expensive clothes, or those with an air of superiority over others, or those suffering from trauma due to marginalization, and watched them slowly realize that in the quest to serve humanity and bring good to this world, we are indeed all created equal. I have seen them transform, leave the shell of their former self, command the respect of their peers, and grow into the noble, empathetic human beings we all aspire to be.
We are once again at a generational crossroads, where identity politics has permeated hearts and minds in every corner of the globe, and sent us into our silos, threatening to unravel the peace with the spread of bigotry, religious phobias, radicalization, and hateful narratives of racial supremacy. And yet, in Pakistan I have worked with Muslim volunteers to provide food, clothes and education to Christian orphans and children, victims of systemic marginalization for generations. In Lebanon I have met Christian volunteers who help Syrian Muslim refugee children remember their traditions and keep their culture alive even when the homes they left behind have been burned to ash.
Young people are the perennial reservoir of hope, as an evolving world will always be in need of those who see past the flaws of the present and aspire to a better future. Only when we create inclusive platforms for young people of diverse backgrounds to interact freely, to share their ideas and experiences, to feed each other’s dreams with the fuel of their exuberance and optimism, only then can we hope to overcome the grave mistakes of the past and the demons that walk among us at present. These are indeed times of great suffering, but only the youth can inherit a world where that pain is a memory rather than a gaping wound. Only through them can we heal, and only by healing together can we hope to not repeat the same mistakes again.
Professor and Author University Rotterdam, NETHERLANDS
Dr. Han Entzinger is Emeritus Professor of Migration and Integration Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. Earlier, Dr.Entzinger held a chair in general social sciences at Utrecht University. He also worked at the Scientific Council for Government Policy, a government think tank close to the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, as well as at the International Labour Office (ILO) in Geneva. Entzinger studied sociology with economics at the Universities of Leiden, Rotterdam, and Strasbourg, and obtained his doctorate at Leiden University. He has advised several European governments on the introduction of civic integration courses for immigrants and has also acted as a consultant to the European Union and the Council of Europe on migration-related issues. From 2013-2018 he chaired the Scientific Committee of the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency in Vienna. Social Service, a non -profit dedicated to promoting children’s rights in the context of international adoption, and immigration and family lawyer in France.
Event Title: Inclusive Social Development in Achieving the Global Goals 2030
Date: September 25, 2019
SPEECH
Diversity and Social Inclusion
Migration is a major source of diversity in today’s world, and it will continue to be so tomorrow. It is often claimed that diversity has a negative impact on social cohesion. The more people in a society differ, the less likely they may be to accept one another and to develop mutual contacts. Is this true? Does diversity negatively affect social cohesion? And, if so, what policies can control or even redress this process?
Before I shall try to answer these questions, it is important to understand the scope of migration as a phenomenon. About 250 million people (3.3 per cent of the world’s population) live in a country other than their country of birth, and therefore can be called immigrants. Immigrants, however, are spread quite unevenly over the world. In traditional immigration countries such as Canada and Australia well over 20 per cent of the population are immigrants (not including the so-called second generation, i.e. children of immigrants). In the USA and Western Europe, this percentage lies between 10 and 15, while in other countries, often the migrants’ countries of origin, it is much lower. There are also countries outside the Western world that attract large numbers of migrants. The Gulf States have the highest shares of foreign citizens in the world – up to 85 per cent, while certain states in Western and Southern Africa and in South-East Asia serve as regional poles of attraction. And don’t forget Russia, which houses many people from countries that were part of the former Soviet Union. Large and populous countries, such as China, India, Brazil or Nigeria may not have high numbers of international migrants, but are characterised by a substantial internal migration, often with a comparable social and cultural impact on the original local or regional communities. If one includes internal migrants, an estimated one billion people, or fifteen per cent of the world population live in an area other than where they were born and raised.
It should also be noted that migration can be a major source of diversity, but it is not the only one. People also differ from one another in many other respects: religion, nationality, gender, ‘race’, sexual orientation, education, political preferences, age, skills, etc. etc. Some of these characteristics are genetically determined (‘ascribed’), others may be the result of individual choice or achievement. In the case of migrants, however, several characteristics ‘accumulate’ so to say: religion, ethnicity, physical traits, unfamiliarity with dominant values and customs and with the local language, often in combination with a relatively weak legal position and social deprivation.
Back to the question whether diversity has a negative impact on social cohesion. In 2007, Robert Putnam, a reputed US political scientist published an article called ‘E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century’. ‘E pluribus unum’, as you will all know, is Latin for ‘Out of many, one’, the traditional motto of the United States, a long-standing country of immigration. Putnam argued on the basis of empirical evidence that living in an ethnically heterogeneous environment was harmful to interpersonal trust and undermined social connections within and between ethnic groups. Faced with ethnic diversity, people would tend “to hunker down – that is, to pull in like a turtle”, as he wrote it, or, in common language, to retreat from social life. Under such conditions, ongoing immigration would erode social cohesion.
Putnam’s conclusions received wide attention in the media and among policy makers, serving as input to public policy debates in various countries. His conclusions have also been challenged by literally hundreds of other scholars from all over the world, who have carried out similar studies in their own countries. The results of these studies are very mixed: some confirm his findings, others reject them, and again others find no significant relationship between heterogeneity and social cohesion. This is partly due to the fact that social cohesion can be interpreted in many different ways: e.g. do we measure attitudes vis-a-vis others, or do we measure actual intergroup contacts? It is also due to the fact that countries differ not only in the composition and history of their immigrant populations, but also in their policy approaches. As a general rule, however, Putnam’s findings appear to hold much less often for Europe than they do for the USA. What also matters is the size of a neighbourhood: the larger the area under consideration, the less noticeable the negative impact of heterogeneity on social cohesion. Social cohesion is something that becomes more concrete in the direct neighbourhood. Policies to promote social cohesion, therefore, should primarily take shape at the local, if not at the sub-local level.
Yet, such policies should not be limited to the local or the neighbourhood level. They should be facilitated by higher levels of governance, the state level, the federal level or even the international level. The tensions that immigration provokes today in many societies are due not only to a lack of acceptance by the native population, but also to a lack of opportunities for newcomers. This is why public authorities should develop policies to redress this situation. Several of the Sustainable Development Goals that the United Nations has defined provide clear guidelines for such policies. I am thinking here, inter alia, of goals such as ‘No Poverty’, ‘Good Health and Well-being’, ‘Quality Education’, ‘Gender Equality’, ‘Decent Work and Economic Growth’, ‘Reduced Inequality’, and ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’. Each of these, and several others, can be translated without much effort into concrete policy measures that, if properly implemented, would benefit immigrants and native populations alike.
A crucial condition for more cohesive societies is the granting of a sound legal position to immigrants. After they have resided in a country for a certain number of years they should be given a full residential status, preferably of a permanent nature, or even full citizenship. Security of residence provides a perspective to newcomers, and for that reason it is a necessary condition for a fuller participation in a society’s major institutions, such as the labour market, housing, education, health care and the political system. The principle of equal opportunity should be leading here: after a limited number of years – a ‘probation period’ – immigrants should have the same rights as everyone else, which obviously implies that they must also have the same obligations.
In the liberal democracies of the Global North we can distinguish two basic ways of creating equal opportunity. One is what I would call the ‘Anglo-Saxon way’: a strong anti-discrimination legislation combined with efforts of affirmative or positive action to compensate for disadvantage and discrimination encountered in the past or the present. The other one is the ‘Continental European way’, which uses the social policy instruments of the welfare state to correct and prevent social deprivation. A drawback of the ‘Anglo-Saxon way’ is that it spurs feelings of being discriminated against among members of the original population, while a weakness of the welfare state approach is that it creates dependency on the state rather than preventing such dependency. As is so often the case, the ideal solution lies in the middle, I think. Discrimination should be attacked under all circumstances, but affirmative action may be a bridge too far. And, more than in the past, social policy instruments should be used to encourage a fuller participation of everyone, not only immigrants. It is better to invest in language courses and in education and training for everyone than in the financial support of newcomers, though they too should, of course, be guaranteed a minimum income level.
A fuller participation of all members of a society, whether immigrant or not, whether at the neighbourhood level or at the national level, is indispensable to achieve more social cohesion. Still, this does not come without certain challenges. A major challenge, particularly in the case of immigrants, is that a fuller participation requires a certain degree of cultural adaptation. It would be tempting to say that such adaptation is reciprocal. In reality, however, newcomers adapt much more strongly to the dominant culture than vice versa. Opinions differ as to how far this adaptation should go; this is one of the big debates in contemporary society, certainly in liberal democracies. The potential tension between participation and the preservation of a separate identity is an issue that keeps coming back in the academic literature, but also in political debates. My Canadian colleagues Will Kymlicka and Michael Banton have labelled this as the tension between ‘recognition’ (of different cultural identities) and ‘redistribution’ (of scarce resources and opportunities). Another colleague, Irene Bloemraad, has written about the difficulty of reconciling the granting of rights, the promotion of participation and the recognition of identity in diverse societies.
It is a struggle that we all recognise, because we all live in societies characterised by a certain degree of diversity, which is increasing in nearly all cases. What is needed under such circumstances is respect for others, and also acceptance of others. That should not be too difficult as long as the other respects and accepts you, but the question is how to act if and when the ideas of the other are disrespectful or are perceived as disrespectful. There are certainly limits to the degree of diversity a society can accept, but opinions differ on how far such acceptance may reach. There is a clear and probably growing gap here between more cosmopolitan attitudes, open to diversity that stems from globalization on the one hand, and more restrictive nationalist attitudes, that wish to protect societies as they once were (or are perceived to have been), often with populist slogans, on the other. This gap is noticeable, certainly all over the Global North. Yet, I think we all agree that complete assimilation – wiping out diversity – provokes and perpetuates inequalities, while fully institutionalised forms of multiculturalism lead to segregation and fragmented societies. In order to achieve inclusive social development, we need to find the middle road that I have tried to describe here in very broad terms.
In short, we can conclude that diversity is on the increase, not the least because of growing immigration. Diversity may challenge social cohesion, but these challenges can be coped with through policies that guarantee a sound legal position, that encourage social participation for everyone, and that promote respectful ways of handling cultural difference. I am not suggesting, though, that this will be an easy road to go!
