This year, the Novia Salcedo Foundation will prioritise its work in favour of youth employment throughout the world over seeking the proclamation of the youth employment decade.

Pegasus, the project that the Novia Salcedo Foundation launched in 2013 to convince the United Nations to proclaim a Youth Employment Decade, will be taking a new direction this year. While we wait for governments to support this goal decisively, the proclamation of the youth employment decade will be relegated to a secondary level; however, this will not affect the organisation’s commitment to finding solutions to the poor employment expectations of young people around the world.

In this sense, the 2018 Action Plan contemplates an ambitious programme of meetings and initiatives to achieve further progress on the three fronts that the NSF is working on to promote youth employment in general and Goal 8 (decent jobs and economic growth) of the SDGs in particular: International relations, Communication, awareness and presence in society, and the Creation and sharing of knowledge.

The first one concentrates the bulk of the actions. The Regional Committees of Africa and of Latin America and the Caribbean, which account for 600 civil society entities in 87 countries that have come together to disseminate the campaign, will continue to receive the support and general coordination of Novia Salcedo to help them consolidate. Within Europe, together with developing the Regional Committee, we shall be working on links with the EU to generate strategic allies to achieve Goal 8.

The United Nations will be a key player in 2018 again. Our special consultative status with the ECOSOC and our position as a partner entity of the UN Department of Public Information provide the NSF with access to several forums and meetings where we can find allies, identify good practices, and spread the knowledge generated by the Foundation. Another challenge will be to strengthen the position of the project before the Office of the UN Special Envoy on Youth, the NGO Groups network, and other agencies.

Efforts will also focus on presenting the campaign and its activities and achievements at local, regional, national, and global forums and events, as well as organising side events and meetings with relevant allies, such as Jóvenes Iberoamericanos, the UN Global Compact, and the coordinators of the Regional Committees. The Foundation is also planning to explore the possibility of collaborating with other European and international initiatives that target youth employment, such as the European Youth Pact or the Latin American Youth Pact.

The greater the number of entities that join forces, the closer we shall be to solving this complicated challenge that affects the future of millions of young people. Consequently, the NSF will be working once again to attract organisations, businesses, motivators, and strategic allies to the youth employment campaign. Entities with the information, knowledge and financial resources that can help identify more opportunities for action.

Finally, we shall also continue to promote awareness regarding the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda among young people through actions and tools that will ensure their active participation as the main agents of change in this process.

Communication and awareness

The 2018 Action Plan preserves, within its actions regarding communications, awareness, and presence in society, its commitment to the campaign’s website as an instrument to spread all the information related to Pegasus and as a place where we can publish news, reports, interviews, and videos that refer to major youth employment-related initiatives and projects. This task also requires our presence in the media and on social networks, with the continuous updating of the Campaign’s profile on Facebook and Twitter.

The third aspect, Creating and Spreading Knowledge, includes, once again, analysing external sources of information (reports, books, bibliographic references, research…) mainly regarding youth employment; obtaining knowledge as a result of the interaction with other agents through the NSF’s links to networks, alliances, platforms, and various stakeholders and international agencies; and detecting good practices, initiatives, and success stories on youth employability. As part of this approach, we shall be holding the fifth edition of the Bilbao Youth Employment Forum, which will include, for the second consecutive year, a side event where young people can participate actively analysing the challenges posed by the 17 SDGs.