Over the past two decades, the level of poverty and social destitution in Ebonyi State, Nigeria, has increased exponentially. Today, besides having one of the highest incidents of cholera, youth unemployment and multidimensional poverty in the country, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, Ebonyi occupies one of the lowest places in Nigeria’s human development index. This trend of social indigence has, overtime, been principally attributed to an inherent disconnect between the policy slant of successive administrations within the State, and the actual needs of Ebonyians. To this end, with the recent emergence of a new government in Ebonyi State, it is imperative to enable an interaction between the policy makers and young leaders whose views reflect the social pulse of the grassroot.The One Youth Policy Summit presents a healthy interactional space to facilitate this process.
The One Youth Policy Summit, held from 21st to 22nd July, 2023, was a two-day policy ideation camp that brought twenty young leaders (drawn from various institutions and development organizations in Ebonyi State, Nigeria) into conversation with policy makers from Ebonyi. During the interactional sessions, the camp participants cross-ventilated ideas on the principal challenges facing the State in areas of Education, Healthcare and Economic Development, with the vision of articulating workable policy models that could be enacted and implemented to address the identified problems.
In their respective clusters of five, the meeting young professionals committed to pulling their resources together to solve a specific problem within Ebonyi state over the next 12 months. Among others, these included sponsoring select Ebonyi students to schools, attracting investors into the state, providing voluntary technical assistance to government ministries and agencies, and championing capacity building projects within Ebonyi State.
The summit also resulted in the creation of a technical committee, at the request of the Director General of the Small and Medium Enterprises development Agency (SMEDAN), that will work with the agency to develop and implement a sound SME blueprint for the State. This team of seven young professionals, drawn from the policy summit, were constituted by One Youth, and inaugurated on Saturday, 15th August, 2023. Recently, they completed the development of an operational plan for the Ebonyi State government.
