Partners with Youth: We believe young people are problem solvers, not problems to be solved.

Positive Youth Development: We firmly believe in the asset-based approach of youth development versus employing a deficit-based view of youth (see: Positive Youth Development, Participation in Community Youth Development Programs and Community Contributions of Fifth-Grade Adolescents).

Tri-Sector Partnerships: We work in partnership with civil society, governments and the private sector to ensure a sustainable approach to improving people’s lives.

Global Standards for Human Rights: We support the key global standards and conventions to improve people’s lives, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Education for All Movement, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Millennium Declaration.

Value-Added Network: While each of our partners has a specific mission aimed at making the world a better place in which to live, we leverage synergies and aggregate their missions with others in the alliance to increase positive impact.

Youth Emphasis: We support efforts made to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with a particular emphasis on engaging young people as partners in this process.

Global in Approach, Local in Implementation: Improving the lives of people is a global goal, whose implementation is different in each country. As such, we build strong alliances with local partners to ensure maximum effectiveness.

Optimistic: We believe that many of the answers are already out there. Good practices do exist and need to be brought to scale.

Policy Change: Currently, the political will and policy actions made to achieve the MDGs are not sufficient. ImagineNations aims to aggregate stories, mobilize investments and advocate for policy changes to make the goals achievable.

Why Young Adults?

Millions of young people are fueled with energy and creative ideas for new enterprises. What they lack in experience, they overcome with determination and imagination. In fact, some research shows that roughly 15-20 percent of young people are inherently inclined toward entrepreneurship and that each young entrepreneur who starts a small business, on average, hires two to three additional employees.

ImagineNations firmly believes that young adults are key to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and can help address some of the disheartening findings with business coaching and access to financial resources:

• About 1.2 billion young people will enter the global labor pool over the next 10 years, yet there are scarce opportunities for employment, high rates of school drop out and low rates of secondary school enrollment and completion in many countries (ILO, 2004).
  
• There are 3 billion children and young adults on the planet; about 50 percent of the entire population is under age 25 (UNFPA, 2004).
  
• In least developed countries, close to 70 percent of the population is under the age of 25 (UNFPA, 2004).
  
• In many sub-Saharan African countries, the median age is below age 20 (esa. un.org/unpp/).
  
• Over 500 million youth live on less than $2 per day. Some 238 million, or 22.5 percent of the world's youth live in extreme poverty, on less than $1 dollar per day (UNFPA, 2004).
  
• Approximately 106 million youth live in extreme poverty in South Asia, 60 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 51 million in East Asia and the Pacific, and 15 million in Latin America and the Caribbean (UNFPA, 2004).
  
• Despite progress in some countries, there is still a growing wealth divide, a growing digital divide and a growing education divide (World Bank, 2005).

The lack of jobs, access, education and capital all lead to a “Hope Gap” with millions of young adults feeling disconnected, isolated and frustrated. Young people are experiencing the brunt of the challenges we are facing yet have no collective global voice and few platforms from which to influence their circumstances.

Despite these statistics, all over the world, and often against enormous odds, huge numbers of young people are working to contribute to the healthy development of their families, communities and nations. Young adults have practical ideas for how to improve their societies. They have the competency, confidence, character and compassion to make positive differences in the world.