Youth taking Turkey by storm
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Turkey, 9 May 2008 – UNDP’s National Human Development Report 2008 – Youth in Turkey – has caused quite a stir: six weeks after its launch it is still in the news, and top of the political agenda. Yesterday, more than forty youth NGOs issued a press release offering their contribution to implementing the recommendations, and the parliament’s youth and education commission has requested a detailed presentation of the findings from UNDP. The lead author Aygen Aytaç explained how it came about and where we go from here.
So, what is your report telling us?
Thanks for your interest. This report links the future of Turkey with investment in its young people today and in the next years. Turkey has a large population, in which the young people offer great potential for the development of Turkish society in every way. But young people have even higher unemployment than the overall population, and some health indicators are quite worrying. In addition, their lack of inclusion in policy-making makes these problems more difficult to solve. Especially as Turkey catches up with its neighbours in the European Union, a well-trained and well-educated workforce is important. Addressing these issues means benefits for the current generation of 15-24 year-olds, but also for future generations and for the whole country.
Remember also that being a Human Development Report, we were concerned also with less economic indicators – things such as participation, access to information and equal opportunities are important in themselves.
The findings and recommendations are based on the knowledge we gained from our meetings with NGOs, academics, state agencies etc, on 100 hours of focus group meetings with particular groups of young people and with parents and on the results of a survey of 3,300 young people, designed together with a survey company and team of sociologists. This ‘mixed methodology’ allowed us to get ideas about the solutions as well as problems and make the report easier for people to use.
There are millions of young people who are in the category of “invisible youth” in Turkey. These include: - Young people actively looking for jobs – about 1 million;
- women who are neither in education nor at work – about 2.2 million;
- the physically handicapped – some 650,000;
- young people who have given up all hope and stopped seeking jobs -300,000;
- juvenile delinquents – some 22,000; and
- street children and youth living on the streets, internally displaced, or are victims of human trafficking and others who rarely get noticed or mentioned in survey studies or in the media.
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The Youth in Turkey report has received more attention than any UN publication ever in Turkey. There has been huge media coverage and discussion continues across society and in government bodies at all levels. How has this happened?
One important factor is that this report addresses a very ‘live’ issue – this report indicates in numbers the realities which everybody sees around. Turkey has a large population of young people, and regarding the most focused-on issue of the number of idle youth, everyone at all levels of society knows someone young who is not working and not studying. Wider, people can see the truth of the report’s words in their lives. It is the first report that takes the snapshot of the whole youth scene in turkey and shows the situation with striking numbers. And we reflect a picture that people realize is serious, so many politicians, academics and journalists are referring to its findings in their talks, interviews, comments and so on. The big response also comes from the fact that this is a truly national report. Everybody owns it.
Can you say some more about that last point regarding ownership of the report?
‘Truly national’ means that all stakeholders – youth NGOs, youth workers, academics, state agencies with an interest in youth – were included from the very beginning. Even six months before the project, we wrote the concept paper with all their inputs. This thoroughly inclusive approach continued through the whole process, with meetings every month with youth NGOs and frequent communications with state agencies and others.
Sharing information easily was also something we made important. We established a special website – www.youthpost.org – covering human development issues and youth. We put up there dozens of documents which we had translated into Turkish (such as UN youth indicators, EU White Paper on Youth, different countries’ youth policies). One small thing we tried to do to increase the acceptance of the report was to use reader-friendly language instead of academic terms. Especially suffixes in Turkish differ a lot between media and academic/bureaucratic language, and we managed to avoid the latter.
What was young people’s role in creating the report? Did it ‘walk the walk’?
I have to say yes! Young people were very involved in this, from the initial brainstorming, to arranging Human Development workshops for academics and state agencies, to making translations and conducting focus groups. Youth NGOs were vital too – they have been enthusiastic for spreading the report, advocating with energy at local level. And it is very exciting to see them working together so strongly – 43 groups published a joint press release calling for implementation of our recommendations, and over 90 groups are now keeping in contact regularly as a result of the whole process.
We have been especially grateful for the good relations with enthusiastic NGOs, since the response has been so large that UNDP can’t handle all the invitations to conferences across the whole of Turkey. Through the network of youth NGOs, presentation of the report has been made numerous times at local level.
What happens next?
We are maybe now in the ‘second phase of reaction’ – the first came after the launch in March, when we had over 300 news stories in the first ten days after the launch, and phone calls from MPs, private companies, state agencies all asking for copies of the report. Now people have had a chance to read and think about the report, there is interest in how to concretely achieve the recommendations. This includes discussions on a National Youth Council and a Youth Law. One concrete result already is that youth NGOs have established a network – youthlink – and are continuing their advocacy, including presenting an action plan to the UN Joint Theme Group on Youth in June. Which points to the positive support from within the UN as well.
The energy and interest of the response has been beyond what I imagined. It has been inspiring to see people react so well to the vision we have given, which was lacking in Turkey in the past.
So thanks for your interest, hopefully it can also inspire other UNDP colleagues, and I am planning to prepare a lessons-learned report to spread this experience as far as possible.
Youth in Turkey: UNDP National Human Development Report 2008
You can read about UNDP's Human Development Reports here.
The UNDP Turkey homepage is here.
