Voices of Youth

Voices of Youth uses information and communication technologies (ICTs) as a tool to engage young people who are interested in issues of human rights and development. It is centred around the full participation of children and youth in communication and advocacy for their own voices and rights; VOY started as a way for more than 3,000 young people from 81 countries to send messages to world leaders at the World Summit for Social Development, held in Copenhagen in the spring of 1995.

The trilingual website (English, French, and Spanish) focuses on issues that affect children and young people, including education, commercial sexual exploitation, water and sanitation, and HIV/AIDS. It is divided into 3 major sections:

1. Explore: Visitors may learn about child rights and development-related issues through factual pages, stories of young people from around the world, quizzes, games, videos, and so on. One portion of this site focuses on youth participation in helping meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
2. Speak Out: The main feature of this section is the Voices of Youth discussion boards. This interactive, archived forum, conducted in English, French, and Spanish, provides details about upcoming events within the next 7 days and offers an opportunity for youth to share ideas and experiences on a variety of topics. It is designed to enable participants to link up with other young people who are VOY members. The Speak Out section also includes: summaries of what is being said in the discussions, summaries of VOY Chats, and articles and poems submitted by VOY members.
3. Take Action: This section is designed to mobilise and inspire youth with new ideas (youth-to-youth). It includes online resources detailing what other organisations are doing to help youth take action, as well as concrete tools to help youth learn the practical skills they need to start their own community projects. The section also includes profiles of youth leaders, in addition to Voices of Youth Digital Diaries, an interactive electronic platform designed to amplify the voices of the world's children and youth. These reports are first-person/eyewitness accounts by young people from around the world, such as that posted by Thembi Ngubane, a 19-year-old from the township of Khayelitsa, South Africa, who has been recording a year-long diary of her struggle to live with AIDS.

Voices of Youth is particularly concerned with reaching and involving young people from developing countries, and youth who do not traditionally have a way to make their voices heard - or have access to the internet. One strategy for including the "unheard" are "VOY Chats": On a regular basis, VOY hosts invitation-only chats on one child-rights-related issue for young people around the world. (Local organisations and UNICEF country offices select youth participants.) On occasion, Voices of Youth chats also invite adult decision-makers to participate.

Children, Youth, Rights.

Voices of Youth is guided by the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a whole, and in particular by Articles 12, 13, and 29. These three articles are dedicated to ensuring young people's rights to participate in decision making processes, to express opinions freely, and to be equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about change in their own lives and in their communities.

According to UNICEF, the proportion of young people in developing countries (35%) who participate in VOY is more than twice the proportion participating on the internet as a whole (14%). Girls' participation in the web discussions as a whole (63%) significantly outnumbers boys' (37%).