 Hello, my name is Sam Loney and I work at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the SDSN. And today I want to give you the opportunity to learn a little bit more about SDSN youth. And I really thank all of you for being here today. The SDGs, you've heard about them this entire day, yesterday, in fact throughout the whole week. But one thing to note about the Sustainable Development Goals is this. Every year we produce the SDG index and dashboards report. And one thing to take away from it is that no single country is currently on track to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. And if we don't, there are serious consequences for that. Whether that's for health, education, climate change, biodiversity, these are all consequences of inaction. So, now I want to share a few insights. The question you might ask is what is SDSN youth and more importantly what is the role of youth in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. And I think it's very important to take into consideration a few facts and figures. So, firstly, half of the world population is under the age of 30. In fact, 82% of them are in the global south. And this generation will go on to be voters, they will be consumers, they will be members of the community. So it's very important that we understand and we recognize that they will have a significant influence just by the virtue of the numbers and their population size. Additionally, survey after survey shows that a lot of young people tend to volunteer and donate to charity much more than their older counterparts. So this shows a sense of idealism and commitment to community service. And if we want to solve some of these issues, the community has to be at the center of it. So it would seem to me that young people who have these qualities and tend to really emphasize community service and charity, they're in a good place to be at the forefront of this. Next, innovation entrepreneurship. Research after research shows that millennials and young people launch twice as many businesses and enterprises as their older counterparts. Again, this is important because these businesses will go on to generate employment, they will generate money and continue to build the market, but also that they will be basically building the next version of technologies and innovations that are going to solve a lot of our challenges. This one is actually pretty interesting. 78% of young people believe in science. Apparently that's very important, so I just wanted to point that out. Also, research shows that they're the most educated generation in human history. And that's important because it means they will have skill sets and capabilities that would enable them to solve complex problems and create solutions for them. Next, a lot of them believe in the ideals of the United Nations. And that's because, again, there are reports and research that shows that young people tend to be much more idealistic than their older counterparts. And that's important because if we are aiming to solve and to achieve an agenda that is so ambitious like the Sustainable Development Goals, it's important that we have idealistic people. Next, it is estimated that 75% of the global workforce will be made up of millennials. So they are going to basically be the employees of companies and be the ones who will be leading the global workforce. And one other thing about millennials is that when surveyed, a lot of them said that they want to work in companies and they want to work in organizations that emphasize and have a social and environmental impact. And they don't want to work for companies that don't. And this is important because it helps create a behavioral shift and a shift within the culture of the companies. Because if you're looking for top talent, then you're going to have to address this very important issue. Also, there are a lot of things in common between these companies. But what if I told you all these companies were started by college students? There are now some of the most powerful companies in the world, but they were started by college students. So this is what I'm talking about when I say they tend to launch twice as many enterprises and initiatives and new technologies and projects. And that's important because some of these could go on to be the most powerful and influential firms and organizations in the world. But that's not just in the current world but also in the old world. What these individuals, these incredible individuals have in common is that most of them did their groundbreaking research or campaigns or basically the change that they made was done in their 20s, whether in their early 20s or late 20s. But one of my favorites, and it's very hard to pick from this, is King Wangchuk of Bhutan, who at the age of 17 made happiness a national indicator for progress and growth. At the age of 17, and that's four decades ago. So that is seriously one of my favorites. But it's not just in the old days either, it's also here. Here's some examples, some wonderful activists and young leaders. And we saw Greta Thunberg at the UN climate summit and the way she's been able to mobilize and inspire millions of people. So there's an energy there but also there is the capability to use creativity and to use innovation and the place in life to make an impact. And this is why we believe at SDSN Youth that young people should be at the forefront of the movement for sustainable development because there are an important stakeholder in it. So this is how SDSN Youth was launched. An initiative to empower young people to tackle the most urgent issues and create sustainable solutions. And SDSN Youth is basically the youth initiative of the SDSN. And the way we do it is firstly we've got a wonderful team. A truly global team from six continents, 30 countries, there are 40 different nationalities. And we've got a massive team of 180 members spread across the world. There are PhD students, there are master's students, undergraduate students, but also young professionals. And despite their other commitments they volunteer and they dedicate time to this initiative because they each believe that something needs to be done. And what we do only is just to provide a support system and to support young leaders in this space to step forward and tackle these big challenges. So we work with 720 organizations around the world. So we're now a global network of 720 student associations and youth organizations across 80 countries. And this number keeps growing every year. And really the objective here is to make sure that we have representation in different countries, but also that for the SDGs to work that we have localization and there is actual impact in the ground. These are some of the partners that we have worked with over time. And I'll go through some of our programs. Now with the Global School, we basically run four major programs. One of them is the Global Schools Program, which is about bringing SDG education into primary and secondary schools around the world. Good solutions. Training and empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators to launch projects and programs and businesses and startups that are going to solve some of our biggest challenges. Training the next generation of young leaders within cities so that they can work with their local governments and their communities to create interventions to address the gaps in the community resilience and sustainability. The SDG Student Program mobilizing universities and using them as hubs for learning more about sustainable development, understanding the local problems, but also brainstorming on potential solutions to solve these problems at the local level. And each year we gather in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Vatican City and we bring together leaders of the major organizations that are working in the area of sustainable development. We bring them together and we brainstorm what can be done, what are some of the steps that we can take, what are some of the things that are needed in this space. And that's critical because it means that we can hear what the gaps are. We can work together and actually build trust and relationships and some incredible initiatives have come out of this meeting because it's a space for co-creation and joint brainstorming. And I'm proud to say we're also going to have it again this year and I'm looking forward to some of the outcomes of this symposium. Now, I don't have time to go through all the programs in detail, but I can go through a little bit of detail with two of our programs. First one, Global Schools. Global Schools comes from this understanding that we're falling behind on the SDGs. So what do we need? We need many more of the citizens of the world to have the skills, the attitudes and values necessary to solve the challenges and to create a sustainable future. That means knowledge of sustainable development, global citizenship values and 21st century skills. These are the requirements that UNESCO identified and there are a series of key competencies that they have identified for this. However, the problem is that most schools and most of these are not being taught. So if we have the next generation coming through, they need to understand and they need to have these knowledge and these values and these skills. So the Global Schools program, what we do is we curate content and we curate knowledge on these issues. We package them together in terms of lesson plans and we encourage schools to use these lesson plans. But that's easier said than done just because we have the content doesn't mean that we can actually get schools to use it. Because, of course, most schools and most teachers are not aware of these. If they're aware, they don't necessarily care and if they do care, finding the right content can be very difficult. So this year we actually launched the Global Schools Advocates program where we have trained 450 advocates from 90 countries who are going to take this content and work with teachers in their communities and work with schools in their communities to introduce this concept. And it has been incredible being able to work with these young leaders because we're learning every day more about what schools want, what they need and how we can change our programs to replicate this, but also raising awareness about this concept altogether. However, that's of course a small step in the larger scheme of things because what we're looking to do now is to actually work at the local level with ministries of education to localize the content, to create better evaluation and monitoring capabilities so that we can learn, we can understand what works and what doesn't in the classroom so that we can enhance learning outcomes. We need to create more digitization and optimization of the content so that it can be better adapted and can be used more easily by teachers. We need to train teachers and build capacity for them so they can teach this stuff in the classroom. So they themselves have to train to do this. And of course advocacy and outreach and I have no idea why it says one there, but it's meant to say five. I'll check this out after. So here is my question to you. Who here has these skills? Because essentially these are some of the skills we're looking for in order to take the global schools program to the next step. If you have skills with pedagogy and curriculum, with data analytics, AI and technology, androggy and vocational training or communications and marketing, we want to hear from you because to solve these problems we need those skills and we need to work with you and learn from you and together to continue to build out this program. Next, the youth solutions program. Einstein famously said we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. I love that quote because it talks about the sustainable development goals. We need new and innovative interventions, projects and approaches to solving these massive challenges. And we talked before about the innovation and creativity of young people and that's important. But I ultimately think that bringing together young innovators with experts and all the generations who have the experience, then you can create some incredible solutions. And this is why we have created the youth solutions program because our research shows that young innovators lack three things. Mentorship, someone who can teach them the content and help them understand the problem. And also teach them some basic skills that they can learn to team management, putting together a pitch deck, marketing, etc. Exposure, so that basically marketing, so other people know about their solutions. And finally, financing. And the youth solutions program is about bringing all of that in an ecosystem. In fact, this year we had applications and we had 4,300 from 173 countries. So the demand is huge. And this is basically the way it works. They apply, they get access to this content and then we track their progress. But it's not enough because we also want to create an innovative curriculum so that more people can get access. We want to create pipelines so they can get to different places and learn from those. We want to deepen the mentorship, increase exposure and mobilize more financing. And for that, we need these skills and these capabilities. So, if you have any of these and if you're interested in working with SDSN Youth, this is all you have to do. SDSN Youth.org forward slash join. We hope to hear from you and together we can work and hopefully achieve the SDGs. Thank you very much.