Making Commitments Matter: A Toolkit for Young People to Evaluate National Youth Policy

Published by the United Nations (UN) Programme on Youth, this toolkit is designed to assist youth organisations and youth representatives in evaluating national- and community-level achievements - and gaps - in realising the goals of the World Programme of Action for Youth (WPAY).

One focus of WPAY is the full and effective participation of youth in the life of society and in decision-making, based on a desire to spur governments in working alongside young people to be part of the solution to development-related challenges. To that end, a specific intention at the time of publication was to provide the UN Secretariat with an effective means of gathering youth input from around the world in order to present the General Assembly in 2005 with an evaluation of WPAY that accurately reflected the sentiments of youth.

However, the toolkit goes beyond that - providing ideas for engaging youth in social mobilisation and advocacy around Millennium-Development-Goal (MDG)-related issues such as inequities in social, economic and political conditions; gender discrimination; insecure livelihoods; high levels of youth unemployment; armed conflict and confrontation; ethnic prejudice; social exclusion; homelessness; continuing deterioration of the global environment; increasing incidence of disease (e.g., HIV), hunger and malnutrition; changes in the role of the family; and inadequate opportunity for education and training.

Click here to access a page where one may download this resource in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish - all in PDF format. Free printed copies of the Toolkit are available in French and Spanish only (the English version is out of print); send an email with your full postal address to: youth@un.org