The State of Youth connects young people from all over the world and focuses on increasing awareness, building advocacy and creating action against the most pressing issues facing the world today, addressed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), through the lens of children’s rights. Today they are launching a global campaign calling on world leaders to come up with a plan that will end the corona crisis for younger generations – wherever they live in the world. If that does not happen, new variants of the corona virus will continue to emerge, with all the consequences that entails. With the campaign, the young people proclaim SDG 19: the right to be vaccinated.
Share and tag your leaders on social media, see the list of handles here.
Sharing instead of monopolizing
The young people argue that the technology needed to develop vaccines should be shared, rather than monopolized. The TRIPS waiver introduced to the WTO by India and South Africa calls to do exactly this, sets a fitting precedent. “It is becoming increasingly clear that no one one is truly vaccinated, until we all are vaccinated”, says Abraham M. Keita, youth board member State of Youth. “Therefore, we ask our leaders to support the WTO TRIPS waiver so we can all get vaccinated and end Covid together.” In order to achieve this goal, the State of Youth asks the richer countries to pay more attention to the vaccination needs of developing countries. To help the world out of this crisis, it is important that these governments make their surpluses available to countries where there is a lack of vaccines. In this way, they too can set up a feasible vaccination program and put an end to the corona crisis.
The campaign takes place worldwide and can be found on social media under the #SDG19NOW.