Core Values and Principles
Youth Empowerment: We focus on empowering and connecting young people to opportunities for pursuing their dreams, building bridges of hope, accessing employment and entrepreneurship education, and solving problems in their countries and communities.
Technology: We address global challenges with information and communication technologies.
Tri-Sector Partnerships: We engage the private, public and civil society sectors in partnerships to ensure a sustainable approach.
Approach: We seek bottom-up approaches.
Commitments: We catalyze top-down, multi-sector commitments for supporting bottom-up growth.
Initiatives: We scale comprehensive initiatives versus single interventions.
Disadvantaged Youth: We emphasize strategies that encourage support of adolescent girls and young women.
Why Young Adults?
Millions of young people are fueled with energy and creative ideas. What they lack in experience, they overcome with determination and imagination.
ImagineNations firmly believes that young adults are key to addressing many of today's global challenges and to achieving the 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.