MINISTER of Youth, Sports and Culture, Olivia Grange said that “youth mainstreaming allows youth to become more integral in the country’s development”.

Speaking at the National Youth Mainstreaming Workshop last Wednesday, she called on all youth stakeholders “to facilitate and promote youth mainstreaming through the integration and participation in the formulation and implementation of national development policies and programmes”.

The minister explained that the government, private sector and NGOs will have to collaborate and “synchronise their activities” in order to achieve the objectives of Vision 2030.

She noted that “youth mainstreaming brings the government closer to achieving their commitment to greater cohesion in the youth sector”, and that the findings of the National Youth Survey will help the Youth Mainstreaming process, as it has made the government and youth serving entities more cognisant of the realities affecting the country’s youth.

Roberta Brown-Ellis, Head of the National Centre for Youth Development (NCYD), explained that the NCYD is instrumental in youth mainstreaming due to its major role in youth policy development. She also stated that “the NCYD will seek to create greater youth inclusion through programmes that will be tailored to integrate the private and public sectors, while engaging young people at all levels of society”.

Youth Mainstreaming is defined as a comprehensive strategy to conventionalise the concerns and experiences of young people as an integral paradigm of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes, in all socio-political and socio-economic spheres.

Brown-Ellis furthered that “a youth mainstreaming manual and action plan will be finalised out of the workshop, which will guide the strategies towards youth involvement in decision making processes as well as bringing together entities to reach young people”.

Youth Mainstreaming falls under the Youth Development Project, which is a loan agreement between the Government of Jamaica and the Inter-American Development Bank in order to provide greater youth opportunities to accomplish Vision 2030.