IGNITE4CHANGE is mostly concerned with the lack of work carried out by relevant authorities in addressing youth homelessness and unemployment.
Ignite4Change member Jone Biunaivalu highlighted this during a recent youth forum saying these issues were not problems that would be easily solved, even in a workshop where there was not enough time to do justice to the scale of the challenge.
However, he said this was not a challenge one could ignore “and we need to accept that there will not be an overnight fix, but that transforming the opportunities for our youths will take many years of hard work and coordinated efforts”.
Mr Biunaivalu said there was a chance to take an in-depth look at the challenges and to think about not just what was needed to help this generation of youths, but how to help the future generation.
“But in the long run, we need something else – a national change – and that is to transform the way our society sees youths and our responsibilities towards them,” he said.
He said relevant authorities must coordinate its approach and begin to address some of the structural problems around housing and unemployment, in ways that we could not do individually.
“We have to realise that by investing in youth’s skills it is not just them who benefit, it is us.”
