The Facebook page of the Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University has announced a two-part webinar to be held on Friday, November 13 and Friday, November 27.

The event is organized by the Youth Development Administration (YDA), Ministry of Education, Taiwan.

TU students are cordially invited to participate in the 2020 Global Youth Trends Webinar online seminar with the theme of Global Partnership – Living together in a time of pandemic and digital technology.

The TU Library collection includes several books on different aspects of the Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as well as digital technology.

Students are welcome to register for the event at this link.

As the YDA website observes,

Due to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, most countries activate pandemic prevention measures and implement border control. This year, we are going digital. The webinar will be held as a prelude of the next year’s event. We expect that the webinar can lead the global youth to think about the possible actions regarding how they can collaborate to prevent the pandemic in the coronavirus crisis.

This year, the whole world faces a severe challenge. COVID-19 changed our lives. Because of the pandemic, global partnership became more important than ever. Taiwan was the first country to resume its baseball league, and managed to control the pandemic without suspending schools after the COVID-19 outbreak. Taiwan has also developed a pandemic information platform and promoted digital technology to prevent the spread of COVID-19, such as name-based mask distribution system and the mask map application.

Living in the time of COVID-19 pandemic is tough for the world. We would like to share invaluable and successful experiences and discuss how global youth can establish partnerships. At the same time, we would like to invite you to think about what we can do together for the world as youth.

For any further questions about the event, please contact Ms. Ruby Chang at email 356@careernet.org.tw or Ms. Judy Lee at email 325@careernet.org.tw

The first webinar on November 13 will be hosted by Ms. Audrey Tang, a Taiwanese free software programmer and Taiwan’s Digital Minister, who has been described as one of the “ten greats of Taiwanese computing personalities.”

Ms. Tang will discuss Taiwan’s pandemic prevention experience. Three leading international panelists have also been invited to share their experiences.

According to her Wikipedia biography,

In August 2016, Ms. Tang invited to join the Taiwan Executive Yuan as a minister without portfolio.

Tang became involved in politics during Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Student Movement demonstrations, in which Tang volunteered to help the protesters occupying the Taiwanese parliament building broadcast their message. The prime minister invited Tang to build media literacy curriculum for Taiwan’s schools, which was implemented in late 2017. Following this work, Tang was appointed minister without portfolio for digital affairs. in the Lin Chuan cabinet in August 2016. They took office as the “Digital Minister” on October 1, and were placed in charge of helping government agencies communicate policy goals and managing information published by the government, both via digital means. At age 35, Tang was the youngest minister without portfolio in Taiwanese history and was given this role to bridge the gap between the older and younger generations.

At the second webinar on November 27, representatives of global youth organizations, including European Youth Forum, World Youth Alliance and One Young World have been invited to participate.

Global youth issues

Among other issues affecting global youth, as described in an International Labour Organization study, Technology and the future of jobs: Global Employment Trends for Youth 2020, is intended

to inform the design and implementation of such policies based on an update of key youth labour market indicators and in-depth assessments of trends and issues in the world of work facing young women and men. The report also comes at a critical juncture. As part of efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 8 to “promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all”, the international community was called upon to, by 2020, (i) substantially reduce the proportion of youth not in employment, education or training (NEET); and (ii) develop and operationalize a global strategy for youth employment. As this report shows, at the start of a new decade, the target to meaningfully reduce the proportion of youth NEET will be missed, highlighting the need to redouble efforts to generate decent jobs for the next generation of workers. Furthermore, youth labour markets around the world face a number of important challenges: the global economy remains sluggish as geopolitical tensions, social unrest and global trade barriers have dragged on growth. Recent epidemics carry the potential to further slow economic activity. These developments are particularly detrimental to youth as their employment prospects, relative to older workers, are more sensitive to economic downturns.

An Executive Summary of the study notes, in part:

The continuing decline in young people’s engagement in the labour market reflects not only the increasing enrolment in education but also the persistence of the youth NEET challenge, especially among young women. The labour force participation rate of young people (aged 15–24) has continued to decline. Between 1999 and 2019, despite the global youth population increasing from 1 billion to 1.3 billion, the total number of young people engaged in the labour force (those who are either employed or unemployed) decreased from 568 million to 497 million. While this trend reflects growing enrolment in secondary and tertiary education, resulting in a better-skilled workforce in many countries, it also highlights the substantial numbers of young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEET), a large majority of whom are young women. Although the global youth unemployment rate is 13.6 per cent, there is considerable regional variation, from under 9 per cent in Northern America and sub-Saharan Africa to 30 per cent in Northern Africa. Unemployment is more prevalent among young women in most subregions. Significantly, young people are three times as likely as adults (25 years and older) to be unemployed. Although this is partly because their limited work experience counts against them when they are applying for entry-level jobs, there are also major structural barriers preventing young people from entering the labour market. Approximately 41 million young people constitute the “potential labour force”, including those who are either available for work but not actively seeking a job (often owing to discouragement) or those seeking but not available to start work immediately (if, say, they are still completing their studies). Globally, one-fifth of young people currently have NEET status, which means they are neither gaining experience in the labour market, nor receiving an income from work, nor enhancing their education and skills. Clearly, their full potential is not being realized, though many may be contributing to the economy through unpaid work, which is particularly true of young women. Globally, young women are twice as likely as young men to have NEET status…

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)