There are over 1.8 billion people on this planet between the ages of 10 and 24—the most at any time in history. This figure is a positive sign, for, in all the societies and countries of the world, young women and men are a group that actively looks for opportunities to generate unprecedented change and renewal.

But today’s youth are disproportionately concentrated in the poorest and most conflict-impacted countries on Earth. In the world’s 48 least-developed countries, children and youth make up a majority of the population. The dangers of this disparity are profound.

These conditions create vicious cycles where poverty and inequality – affecting millions of young people –severely dim their societies’ futures. What’s more, poverty and inequality in one generation lead to conflict within and between nations in the next, which opens the door to a future of chronic fragility, causing further poverty and violence, and so on. Violence has always had a major impact on the lives of young people—they are often among the first to be targeted as victims or recruited to join armed forces—but for too long, decision-makers have seen youth as being only those things, victims or perpetrators, and not as partners, as equals, with the capacity to be voices for hope and forces for lasting peace and sustainable development.

Fortunately, the need to promote youth as key players in addressing the challenges of our times is increasingly acknowledged around the globe. For example, last year, the leaders of the world adopted the 2030 Agenda, which both places transformative change at the center of the national and global stages and recognizes the potential and power of youth in all countries. Therefore, in placing the 2016 International Youth Day under the theme “The Road to 2030: Eradicating Poverty and Achieving Sustainable Consumption and Production,” the United Nations decided to stress the leading contribution of young people in making concrete the universal aspirations contained in the 2030 Agenda.

With its 17 crosscutting goals, the 2030 Agenda will help the world take important steps toward achieving universal education, improving access to information, ending the use of child soldiers, and reaching other outcomes that will empower youth to participate in the political and peacemaking processes. And just last December, the UN Security Council passed its first ever resolution on the role of young people in ending armed conflict. The Security Council is calling on nations to do more not only to protect and empower youths living in areas impacted by conflict, but to engage them as leaders and decision makers who have an important part to play in shaping the future of their countries.

This is exactly what the Whitaker Peace & Development Initiative has been working toward since our founding in 2012 and with the support of such partners as UNESCO and Ericsson. We envision a world where young people everywhere are empowered with the education, the technology, and—most of all—the belief in themselves that they need to come together in staggering numbers to overwhelm their societies’ most-pressing challenges.

Because when we give young women and men the tools to become leaders and change makers, they are capable of remarkable things. In South Sudan, a nation torn by violence, two of the youth peacemakers we work with are currently serving in their nation’s parliament, bringing to the national debate a message of reconciliation and dialogue across ethnic divides. Others have received mandates from their governor to mediate long-standing conflicts between local tribes. In Uganda, former child soldiers are working together with small loans from WPDI to start businesses and community-building projects in their villages. From the ashes of war, they have become entrepreneurs and role models for the other young people in their communities.

Those are but a handful of positive stories out of a total population of 1.8 billion youth on this planet. If we could harness the energy of even a modest fraction of these eager young women and men, their small acts of goodness could help leverage peace and development to any corner of the world. Let’s resolve to empower the next generation of leaders and thinkers to do just that.

 

Over the past decade, we’ve seen many examples of how technology has changed the ways we respond to crises and build broad-based, popular movements.

After the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, individuals on the ground used the crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi to help direct search-and-rescue teams to the locations where they were needed most. In 2011, Arab Spring protesters organized on Twitter and other social-media platforms to create political transformations throughout the Middle East.

But despite the potential that information and communications technologies (ICTs) hold for mitigating disasters, promoting democracy, and creating peace, the very countries that could benefit the most from these tools are the ones where they are the most under-utilized. The International Communications Union (ITU) compiles statistics on the prevalence of ICTs across countries. In the developed world, for example, over 80 percent of individuals use the Internet; in the developing world, less than 35 percent do. What’s more, in the least-developed countries—those nations that, according to the U.N. display very low indicators of socioeconomic development—less than 10 percent of people have access to the Internet.

Increasing ICTs’ penetration into the developing world, particularly into the least-developed countries, will be an important piece of the global-development and peacebuilding agendas in the coming decade. In fact, one of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals adopted last year is to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least-developed countries by 2020.

Much of Whitaker Peace & Development Iinitiative’s work empowering youths in regions of the world impacted by violence, poverty, and conflict relies on leveraging the potential of ICTs. Fundamentally, our philosophy is that young women and men are able to confront the challenges facing their communities most effectively when they do so together. Online social networks and smart phones allow our youth to reach out to each other, to form friendships and connections, and to brainstorm their responses to crises in real time.

Thanks to the generosity and dedication of the team at Ericsson, many of the youth we work with around the world are given smartphones and tablets and receive comprehensive training on how to utilize these tools to spread peace.

Our youth peacemakers are using these technologies to make a real and tangible difference in their communities. A few months after we launched our program in South Sudan, the nation was plunged into civil war. The fighting was most concentrated in Jonglei State, right where our program was centered. I was heartbroken to see how the violence impacted the young people we worked with, but I was also incredibly proud of how they responded to the situation. After the fighting started, they reached out to one another, often across ethnic lines. They called each other with warnings when they knew there was danger on the road ahead. They essentially formed an early-warning system, spreading information through their network and sharing that knowledge with their friends and neighbors. They acted as a single entity, dedicated to keeping people safe and advocating for non-violence.

In the short-term, ICTs can be a crucial component in responding to crises and managing disasters, but they can play an equally important role in long-term peacebuilding as well.

Nelson Mandela once said that “education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” ICTs are already revolutionizing the way individuals consume education. Here in the United States, for example, distance learning and iCourses have become common. Increasing the prevalence of ICTs in the developing world would be a great equalizer in allowing people in these countries to access the same knowledge and educational resources that those in the developed world take for granted. In the near future, a boy in rural South Sudan could learn about engineering from a professor at MIT. A young woman in Mexico could take a management course at the London School of Economics. A farmer in Uganda could bring his questions to an agricultural expert in South Africa.

As technological innovations expand the frontiers of what is possible, we must continue searching for ways to put this new potential in the service of the global peacebuilding agenda. WPDI and its partners are continuing to work at the forefront of these efforts with youths in conflict-impacted areas around the world.

Editors note: May 17 was World Telecommunication and Information Society Day. The theme was “ICT entrepreneurship for social impact.” The piece above is an  excerpt from Forest Whitaker’s October 2015 piece on technology and development.