Speech of Ambassador Christina Lassen: Youth – How to be an agent for positive change
I am very happy to welcome you all to this event here tonight where we hope to have an open and substantial dialogue about how young people can bring about positive changes and be leaders in their communities. We have chosen all of you to come here for what you – in spite of your young age – already stand for, and we are eager to have your input and hopefully at the same time inspire you to engage yourself even more when you hear about the opportunities out there. You will both hear from other peers who have had a chance to engage themselves in our programs, and after the presentations we will all have a chance to network and get to know each other better.
And why do we focus on youth? It sounds banal, but young people are – obviously – the future of this country. But young people are typically also agents for change – because you are less set in your manners and ideas and often have new and fresh ideas about the world. We want to help you channel this energy into helping your communities and be positive agents for change.
It was probably never easy to be young, but these years, we feel that it is particularly challenging with the bombardment of social media, the incredibly high demands to deliver on all levels whether personal or in school, and with the general economic crisis that affect most of our countries.
Like in Europe, one of the most severe challenges for young people in Lebanon is to find a job that suits their skills, qualifications and interests. Youth unemployment is high in Lebanon and estimated to be at around 20%, and the transition out of school into the labour market takes an average of 10-16 months. Like in many other countries, there is often a mismatch between the skills of the graduates and the skills that the employers demand which make this problem even more pronounced. The income of those who do manage to find a job are sometimes just enough to sustain a minimum living standard and the inequality in terms of salaries is striking.
Lebanon has faced difficult times these past years and young people are, of course, directly impacted by many of the challenges facing the country. The struggles to make a decent living can certainly lead to a certain feeling of disenchantment or disempowerment. A worrying trend is that unemployment seems to hit the most educated the hardest: young people with university degrees. As a result, many young graduates look for opportunities outside Lebanon.
We all need to try to reverse those trends. This is why the European Union is funding many activities in the country that benefit youth. They range from basic education to both Syrian and Lebanese children in the areas that are most hit by the Syrian crisis, to vocational training and higher education for Lebanese youth through our Tempus and Erasmus + programs. We also fund civil society organisation that work to improve the employability of youth, others that aim at decreasing the drop-out rate of students, we fund activities that enable youth from less privileged communities to take part in cultural activities, we fund civil society organisations that help youth get out of drug addiction , just to name a few. We are helping traumatised children and youth who have suffered horrible experiences in Syria through psycho-social support . On a more institutional level, one of our projects is providing technical expertise for the implementation of a national youth strategy in Lebanon.
Because as you may know, Lebanon launched a "Youth Policy for Lebanon" back in April 2012. This strategy gives us an outline of what is needed to enable young people to become constructive agents of change and to better integrate socially, and professionally into society. We support the implementation of this youth policy through a programme with the Ministry of youth and other stakeholders dealing with youth development. But we need you to make sure that it actually happens and that Lebanese civil society will become more involved in policy development related to young people's political, social and economic rights. We need to make the Ministry of Youth the most attractive of all ministries, as Prime Minister Hariri said when he launched the new Government’s program.
Tonight we will have the chance to listen to some of the opportunities that have been realised with the support of the EU and we are very excited to hear your various stories and ideas.
The exchanges and the programmes that the EU funds bring people closer together and they also build cultural bridges that can encourage empathy and understanding in a world that is –and will continue to be- increasingly interconnected.
Many challenges remain ahead of you, some are immense, but so is your motivation to be agents for positive change. Representing more than a quarter of this country's population, you are this country's future leaders and there is just no better way to invest in Lebanon than to keep investing in you, your skills, your creativity, your dreams and the opportunities to make them a reality.
I wish you the best luck in seizing those opportunities and making the best of it.
Yalla chabeb, Yalla Lubnan!