International Youth Day 2014
The first International Youth Day was declared on August 12, 1999 by United Nations General Assembly as a day set apart to draw attention to the issues and struggles facing youth around the world.
As a global organization, World Vision works with children, their families and communities in nearly 100 countries worldwide. One of the organization’s foundational goals is to mobilize youth to be change agents who fight poverty, hunger and injustice in their communities and around the world.
World Vision’s youth empowerment and development project in Azerbaijan began during the summer of 2007 with a three-month pilot project to educate youth on how to search for employment. After identifying the main challenges and gaps in youth development and socialization, World Vision was able to develop two tracks to help youth: first, through the provision of vocational trainings to the youth with disabilities and/or those who had left institutional care and second: through the empowerment and inclusion of youth from vulnerable communities in development trainings. Both of these programmes had the objective of strengthening the capacities of the youth, while also increasing the quality and quantity of opportunities available to them to participate in society.
To date, 1,993 young people have participated directly in World Vision’s youth empowerment programmes in Azerbaijan. They have received training on skills like as resume writing, job search, time management and project proposal writing in: Alat, Gobustan, Umid and Sahil districts on the outskirts of Baku, Azerbaijan.
Also, since 2009 World Vision in Azerbaijan has been in cooperation and collaboration with the Ministry of Education to support the improvement of the professional technical education and youth entrepreneurship opportunities in Azerbaijan. The new standards of professional technical education were developed and piloted in two community vocational schools. In the pilot, 42 young people enrolled in technical courses to become electric-gas welders, metalworkers and web-designer specialities. World Vision worked with partners in the development of each of the courses to help provide youth with more marketable skills.
“Trainings in our city are relatively expensive and displaced people living on state allowances and with non-permanent income and place cannot afford them,” says Shafag, 26, whose family fled their homeland after armed the conflict with Armenia during 1992-1993. After attending knitting courses, organised by World Vision for two months, Shafag can now easily use skills to knit jackets, blouses, clothes, shawls and even socks for kids. Having improved her skills, Shafaq receives orders to knit different types of clothes and earns money to help support her family.
“I wish I [could] make all women beautiful,” said Shalala, a 25-year-old woman living in the Umid settlement who was the recipient of a small business grant. “The grants donated by World Vision through the Youth Development and Employment Network Project gave me the opportunity to set up [my salon] with all the necessary equipment. I am very pleased when an elegant lady leaves my salon with smile on her face,” she says. Shalala lived on the state allowances and a non-permanent income before. Without the grant, she never would have been able purchase the supplies necessary to open her salon, and her opportunities to have a brighter future would have been greatly reduced.
Stories like that of Shafaq and Shalala are at the core of what the organization, whose goal is to improve the lives and futures of the world’s most vulnerable children, is all about.
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