Youth in Turkey: UNDP report 2008

How easy is it for young people in Turkey to reach their ideals? How many of them are able to make their projects come true? What are the challenges they have to face? Are they aware of all the opportunities that are open to young people? The answers to these, and other, questions, can be found in Turkey’s National Human Development Report, Youth in Turkey, presented in Ankara on March 21, 2008.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) issues global human development reports under various themes each year, and national human development reports every two to three years. The theme of Turkey’s national report this year is youth. “Turkey must now focus on developing comprehensive policies for youth in order to ensure that the country has a healthy, educated and skilled society to face the challenges of the next 15 years and beyond”, says the report, whose presentation in Ankara was attended by government officials, third sector representatives and, of course, the leaders and participants of Turkey’s youth movement.

Youth in Turkey is innovative not just because it has chosen to look at an often overlooked aspect of society but also because, for the first time, the writing of a UNDP report was not undertaken by experts but by the subjects of the national development study themselves: young people.

The idea behind making the 4, 000 young people who participated to the report into first hand protagonists stems from the belief that nobody can be a better “expert” about the ideals, ambitions and problems of young people than youth its self. Moreover, one of the UNDP development report?s guidelines is to encourage people to become owners of their own development, to actively participate in the solutions to their problems.

Youth in Turkey is the result of a comprehensive ‘State of Youth’ Survey carried out among 3,000 15-24 year olds in 12 different regions of Turkey and twenty four focus groups with 200 young people and 30 adults. Several NGOs, 30 public institutions and more than 30 academics have supported the efforts of this unorthodox research team.

The report is launched online through the UNDP website and the website of Youth Post, a youth NGO that provides services and information to young people in Turkey. The report’s launch was followed by a two day knowledge fair at Ankara?’s World Trade Centre where Youth in Turkey was presented to youth organisations, international institutions, universities and government officials in order to stimulate the active participation of youth and as a means of encouraging them to build cooperative relationships with each other.