Youth Consultation Workshop on Beyond 2015 agenda, Sustainable Development was held on 30th May, 2014 by Beyond 2015 Nepal Hub in support of ICIMOD and other organizations like Nepal Tunza Youth Environment Network (NTYEN). The main objective of the workshop was to make youths aware of the issues of Beyond 2015, discuss on the cross cutting sustainable development issues like ICT, Sustainable consumption and Production, water and sanitation, Mountain sustainability etc.
Many facilitators gave presentations on various topics. Mr. Vaskar Singh gave a brief introduction of ICIMOD (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) and its past activities for the sustainable development of the mountains. He mainly focused on the impact of climate change increasing rapidly in the mountains. Mountain people are facing constraints of transportation, telecommunication and poor socio-economic background. On this aspect, climate change is making life even harder, says Mr. Singh. The water resources are drying, the glaciers are melting, and production pattern has shifted creating big challenges to the mountain people as Mountains are the first to be affected but with no combating strategies, the effects are longer to last. ICIMOD in this regard has been implementing strategies like high value crop production, value addition to the crops and medicinal herbs, Incentive based Forest Conservation, community forestry etc.

Photo: Mr. Vaskar Singh Karki making a presentation
Facilitators Juliette DECQ, David Collste gave skype presentation on climate change and sustainable development. Regarding these issues, youths are not in charge of the era, so, youths need elder people to guide them so that a long term sustainable solution can be found out, said Miss Juliette.

Photo:  Skype Presentation of Juliette DECQ
Finally, a group discussion was carried on. Each group identified major issues and problems of a given topic with their individual solutions. The presentation of the group work was done by the group host. Myself being the host of the group, ICT (Information Communication Technology), presented lack of technical education, entrepreneurship, crowd sourcing platform, lack of fund, gender inequality and social inclusion issues, lack of good governance etc. as the major issues of ICT. And the solutions we identified were education and capacity building, good governance with effective policies, awareness programs, monitoring, evaluation and triangulation of existing infrastructures, public-private partnership etc.

Photo: Myself in a group discussion