PAIMAN Alumni Trust in collaboration with Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science and Technology (FUUAST) has organized a 2 days on campus training for university students under the project Pakistan Youth Initiative – II, funded by Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) Pakistan. The training envisions addressing the challenges relating to youth participation in the development process and enabling them to play an active role in promotion of social cohesion by equipping youth with the tools of dialogue and mobilization for peace, creating awareness of their rights and entitlements, and supporting them to engage with their own community on issues relating to peace and development that will enable behavior transformation and motivate them to take action.
The objective of the training was capacity building of selected group of 50 students on Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), resilience, social cohesion, active citizenship, social accountability including social inclusion and gender, that will aid youth in playing their role as active citizen & share the learning with their peers in university and also take learning to home and communities.
The following topics were covered in this session in a comprehensive manner:
- Main concept of SDGs & Role of youth in achieving them
- Concept of citizen led monitoring of SDGs
- Social cohesion & its components
- Concept of resilience and characteristics of a resilient community
- Social accountability
- Active citizenship
- Social inclusion & gender specific responsibilities
During this training, detailed discussions were carried out with students so as to access their understanding on topics like SDGs, social cohesion, resilience, social accountability, active citizenship and social inclusion. VSO and PAIMAN’s collective efforts for youth engagement were also deliberated in detail so as to encourage youth to do more for their society. The role of youth was highlighted in each concept specifically so as to look into innovations and improvements which could be proposed by youth for positive societal development.
During feedback taken from participants, it was observed that students were highly motivated and happy with quality of information imparted to them. They were content with methodology used for this session.
Below are some comments from the participants;
I was completely unaware of the term SDGs before this training. However, due to these sessions, I can now comprehend the significance of role of youth for achieving these milestones. I will make sure that I spread this message to my colleagues and community. (Areeb Tariq)
Trainers explained the concept of resilient society in such a comprehensive manner that I was able to understand it very easily. I can see how a resilient community could contribute more in social, economic and commercial perspective. (Amina Zafar)
