With more than 1.8 billion young people around the world, youth make up the largest generation that this world has ever seen. It is impossible to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 without the active participation of the largest generation of changemakers. To ensure young people can take part in the 2030 Agenda, the availability of a youth development monitoring framework is essential the context of the SDGs to effectively track indicators across different targets, thereby supporting an integrated and comprehensive approach given the centrality of addressing youth needs and rights as a key to ensuring sustainable development.
If young people and their movements and organizations are going to have a chance to organize and develop the social infrastructure around engaging in the process, it will have to be a more transparent, organized, and regular process. As highlighted, in the ‘Believe in Better’ joint working paper, transparency in SDGs accountability process should also translate to better access to information for young people on the SDGs and state-led reviews; facilitating youth data collection processes – both collecting data on youth i.e. age and gender-disaggregated regarding the SDG targets but also importantly enabling young people to do monitoring more broadly across the targets.
The ambition to empower young people as agents of changes that can contribute to accountability process of SDGs must also be equipped with relevant resources that will help young people fulfill their role. Together in collaboration with UN Office of Information, Communication, Technology (OICT) and Qlik, a data visualization platform was created to measure the state of youth in the SDGs. The data visualization platform aims to effectively track youth indicators across different targets and support an integrated and comprehensive approach given the centrality of addressing youth needs and rights as a key to ensuring sustainable development.