For a meaningful involvement of young people in European cooperation
Meaningful inclusion of young people in Macroregional strategies is one of the main challenges that the Strategies are striving to address and actively working on it.
Recommendations on how to better achieve this have been collected in ‘Manifesto for young people by young people to shape the European cooperation policy’. With the general objective of increasing the participation of youth in the governance and decision-making processes of the EUSAIR and Interreg IPA programmes in the Adriatic and Ionian region, especially in the candidate countries, Cooperation Development Institute (CDI) organised INTERREG IPA EUSAIR Youth Conference “For a meaningful involvement of young people in European cooperation”. The improvement of meaningful involvement was also addressed through the lens of 12 recommendations from the Manifesto for young people.
The Conference took place in Tirana on 9 December 2022. It was organized by CDI in cooperation with the European Commission's Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO) and in partnership with Tirana European Youth Capital 2022. The aim of the evetn was to learn more about Interreg IPA programmes, how to engage and benefit from these programmes and to broaden our networks.
Some answers to one of the main questions on how is Interreg and specifically EUSAIR investing in young people were provided by Magdalena Rakovec from the Centre for European Perspective, who with EUSAIR Facility Point Lead Partner co-organised (Young) EUSAIR Communication Academy. At the discussion “INTERREG IPA: Entry points and available engagement mechanisms for youth” she talked about Academy as a good practice example of the inclusion of young people. While the overall objective of the Academy was raising awareness of EUSAIR among young people and their final outputs were EUSAIR digital campaigns, the Academy also greatly improved the knowledge and communication skills of the young participants, therefore also contributing to their skill-building in an increasingly important area. Improving young people’s skills and better (digital) communication are two of the five fields identified in the Youth Manifesto as challenges that EU cooperation should strive to address. At the discussion, other youth activities such as EUSAIR Popri competition, developments in the field of the institutionalisation of youth inclusion in EUSAIR, the content of the recommendation of the Youth Manifesto and how to apply them, have also been addressed.
