Where are the youth that aren’t being represented in global decisions? How can their voices be heard? After biking from Amsterdam to Cape Town, through twenty countries and two continents, Jilt van Schayik and his comrade Teun Meulepas tried to bring the answers to these questions to the United Nations through their project titled Building Bridges. The Building Bridges Foundation was created as a platform for the youth that are underrepresented in developing countries to have a voice in policy implementation. Our team was fortunate enough to sit down and talk to Jilt about his experience during this project and what goals Building Bridges has accomplished in the last six months.
The inspiration of the project started in the two years that Jilt was a youth delegate to the United Nations. During this time, he focused on talking to young people both in the Netherlands and outside his home country. What he started to notice during these opportunities was that the voices of young people were not always taken seriously and young people were also not always represented. When young people were represented in the General Assembly or other UN events, they were from developed countries and families with money. This type of marginalization leads to an inaccurate representation of youth around the world since 90% of youth are not living in privilege.
The theme of this year’s new post 2015 agenda is leave no one behind; this includes the vast majority of youth whose voices are not heard. Jilt started to look at opportunities in which he could do this after he met a UN worker in New York who told him about a campaign that he held riding his motorcycle through five African countries to raise awareness for gender equality. This inspired the boys to consider honouring their home country’s tribute to cycling and attempt the same type of journey.
With his partners, Jilt selected youth ambassadors from every country that was on their road map. These youth ambassadors would organise a three day program in their country which would include a youth consultation in the capital that brought together young people, policy makers, and people from UN entities. The goal of these events were not just to be a platform where young people could have a chance to speak out about the issues that they deemed important, but to create a network where young people would be connected to UN entities, the media, and policy makers. Having these connections during the adoption of the new agenda gave the youth in these countries an opportunity for their voices to carry beyond these consultations and into the UN Headquarters.
Even though the consultations were held in the capitals, the youth in the surrounding towns were a priority as well. By cycling, the boys were able to go through all of the towns and create a trustworthy environment instead of traveling by car or plane. These were the youth whose voices needed to be heard in New York, and so a clip was published of the Building Bridges journey in Times Square during the week of International Youth Day on August 12. This clip featured five youth that Jilt and Teun met in Congo, in the middle of the Sahara, and Ghana along with pictures and quotes from them. This was the type of bridge the foundation was looking to build.
One particular story that stood out to Jilt was the story of a man named Muhammad that they met after 120 kilometers of cycling on their first day in Africa. Muhammad had left his family behind to work in North Africa and he explained to Jilt and Teun that even though he was not making enough money, he was building a boat to cross the sea between Morocco and Spain this Summer. Jilt and Teun were shocked because they had just came from there and seen the situation that the middle sea was currently enduring. Then they realised that this was the constant reality to people from Africa. Three weeks later, they found themselves cycling through Botania and saw the reality of the thousands of people in the Mediterranean Sea. About 600 of these people had passed away and the two explorers had a direct view of how real the hardships were that these people dealt with every day as a norm. “Those moments you realise I’ve been in New York, I’ve seen the SDG negotiations, but then to go out and get these personal stories, these goals are no longer far away or on paper. They become alive,” Jilt said when he told us about Muhammed.
A couple days after this experience, the team learned that the Dutch Mission at the United Nations had organised a side event about youth with ambassadors from the places they had cycled through. Jilt and Teun were given the chance to join in on skype where they could share the personal stories from their journey. At this event, the point was raised that countries are continually discussing border control, but instead should be focused on building bridges and not walls. Three weeks after this conference, a newspaper article was released in the Netherlands that explained that the Minister of Trade and Development had appointed 50 million euros to foster youth employment in the North African countries. “Although we are not claiming that we made her make this decision, we do feel like we were part of a movement that brought these stories to life, Jilt explained to us, “we think when she signed that document that he must have thought about Muhammed or one of those other stories.”
Currently, Jilt and Teun are working on an exhibit that they would like to have live during the SDG summit to remind those who are signing the agreements who the people are that they are doing it for. “While we may not directly influence policy, we think this might be a reminder that whatever decision they make at the end of the day will be a better decision because of these stories,” Jilt concludes with.
To learn more about the Building Bridges journey, watch below the Skype interview with with Jilt van Schayik :