Politicians urged to educate youth on global development

Mr Douglas Quartey, the Programmes Manager, Youth Bridge Foundation, an NGO, has appealed to politicians to endeavour to include global developmental goals in their campaign messages.

He urged the politicians not to only concentrate on educating the populace on their manifestos but also on issues that pertain to the total development of the world such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Mr Quartey said this on Wednesday, during a forum to educate the students of Accra Polytechnic on the global developmental goals such as the MDGs, and the Global Sustainability Development Framework, which was the other developmental goal agenda designed by the UN to replace the MDGs after 2015.

He intimated that although the MDGs would be ending this year, Ghana had not been able to achieve all the eight goals as stipulated.

He mentioned the reduction of poverty by half, the attainment of universal basic education for children as the only MDGs that Ghana had been able to fully achieve.

Those that the country had not been able to achieve include the prevalence of maternal and infant mortality, empowerment of women, global partnership and sustainability and environmental protection.

He urged the youth to endeavour to seek knowledge and make their views on developmental issues heard.

He said the forum was also to solicit the views of the youth on global developmental issues and which would form part of the opinions of the youth of Ghana as far as the Copenhagen Consensus, which seeks to tabulate the opinions of the youth of the world.

He said Youth Bridge would continue to organize such fora for students to broaden their horizon on developmental issues.