The DEAR Programme it's one of our oldest or longest standing development programmes in the EU.It was conceived in the 1970s, so it's over 40 years old now.The DEAR Programme it's an acronym standing for Development Education and Awareness Raising.The overall aim of this programme is to develop European citizens' awareness and alsotheir critical understanding of the sustainable development,and also the global challenges or transformationalchallenges that we face in a globalised world.One of the important aspects of this programme is that we try to make citizens aware of alsotheir individual roles and responsibilities towards these global challenges.It's the only Global Development Programme that we have in the EU that is focused primarilyon EU citizens.So that's kind of unique for our DG.The most important one would be through our call for proposals, which is opento civil society and local authorities.And we also have some direct awards.These projects are such a vast diversity of types of projects.Whether it’s campaigning and advocacy ones, and one of those type of actions;or global learning ones, giving actions in formal education and non-formal education.You have workshops, all forms of capacity building actions.We have performances, field trips, reports, SDG watchdogs…It's truly endless, a vast array of different actions.So yeah, that's the DEAR programme.The European Consensus on Development recognises young people as important agentsof development and change.Therefore, as contributors to the 2030 agenda.And the DEAR programme walks the talk on this if you will.So that's some of the thinking behind it.We also see youth as the best bang for our buck.As the recent Eurobarometers have shown, youth are also the most open tonew ideas, open to change, especially with things like the digital age that we live innow they're the most adapted to that.So, there are many reasons why we recognise them as the best multipliers of our messagesthat we want to pass on.So that's why we have targeted them specifically.