Bogdan Covaliu

Tuesday afternoon, me and Alexandra held a speech in the Third Committee for Social Development at the United Nations. Although initialy we each prepared one speech, due to procedural limitations we had to have a common message for the UN.

Since this is my personal blog :-p, I’m ataching my original speech, as it was meant to be, and you can all read our common speech on the unyouthdelegate.ro and on the unyouthdelegates.org websites, where it will be uploaded shortly.

Here it goes:

“    Mr. Chairman and honorable delegates,

A lot of people travel many miles to find the end of the world. As we all know, the world is round and the end is fortunately nowhere to be found, but now, we can all say that the world as we know it, has a top, and that top of the world in 2008 is in a symbolic way represented by the United Nations - a place where the entire humanity gathers and works together for achieving the goals that they have themselves agreed upon.
It is both an honor and a privilege to be here today and represent the voice of young Romanian people at the General Assembly of the United Nations. However, looking back to my life in Romania, the country where I was born and raised, a find myself and my fellow friends to be in a very fortunate position by being able to complete our education, to benefit from health assistance and health related programs, to vote and stand for in elections, to be able to walk without fear on the streets, to freely express our opinion in public. We take all these for granted!
Despite all this, Romanians are only 0.1 % of the world’s population and although many things need to be changed at our national level as well, I sadly discover everyday that at a worldwide scale things are not quite as fortunate as back home.
Although the increase in efforts to educate young people may seem a financial burden to many governments, this is, in my personal opinion, the best way to approach and break the vicious circle that we’re spinning in.
Making education available and affordable for all will not only result in a population that will produce more for the society, leading to a social and economic growth, but will also lead to a healthier, more aware population that will be able to protect themselves against  diseases like AIDS or Tuberculosis.
One of the major problems that derives from incomplete education, is related to the difficulties young people have in the field of work, most of them having problems in finding a job that best suits their needs and previous training. Local and national work markets are now becoming international work markets, resulting in the necessity of finding universal solutions to these problems. Many governments are forced to put their poverty, diseases, ethnic and religious conflicts first on the agenda when it comes to tackling the employment issue. In these countries, and not only, NGOs are doing significant efforts to ensure that education and its direct results on employment remain a national priority on the political agenda. NGOs and their volunteers are now playing a major role in achieving the development goals, but in order to ensure continuity, and to make their goals a reality, their work must be backed up by legislative and fiscal policies, that need to focus on youth, the most vulnerable category in the labor market.
Cooperation between the public and private sector (both businesses and NGOs)  is a must, when it comes to youth development. Encouraging self employment, education and training through volunteering, adapting the curricula to the market’s needs and supporting entrepreneurship should be on the focus of all youth aimed policies.
Today’s youth are tomorrow’s leaders! Let’s give young people a chance to achieve their full potential, to educate themselves, to protect their rights, to actively participate in the decision making process at all levels, and last but not the least, let’s give young people the chance to choose.
We already have the framework, we have the capacity, we have the human resources and we have the financial background to support our actions in achieving our goals. All we need to do, is to open our minds and souls, work together as a whole and get things done.
In 2015, some of us might no longer have the privilege to look back on our actions, some of us will still struggle to make the world a better place and some of us will be in this room amazed by the huge step that humanity took forward, by accepting and assuming the MDGs. Either way, in 2015 I’d like to be able to tell my children that we did our best for the world that they are living in.

Thank you Mr. Chairman “