Supporting youth interconnectivity

HYPE Sri Lanka held its launch and interactive stakeholder discussion recently. A youth organisation it aims to become the first youth incubator in Sri Lanka with a vision of creating youth inclusive sustainable development.

Instead of helping youth empowerment from the bottom up, HYPE starts off with the top- level, aiming to connect all the youth- oriented organizations working within Sri Lanka to coordinate through a central hub and eliminate project redundancy. They also aim to create inter- stakeholder links in order to provide the system with a strong foundation.

The vision of the organization is to be a “catalyst for inclusive and sustainable youth development.” During their launch program, HYPE not only explained what they intend to do, but they also presented a working paper on model youth policy of Sri Lanka, broadly classifying everything under six areas of thematic development;

Youth employment

Youth education

Youth health, wellbeing and reproductive rights Protection of vulnerable youth groups Youth political and civil rights Individual development of youth and self- identity.

After the presentation of the working paper, two panel discussions were held with various youth organizations as well as governmental and non- governmental organizations as to what they feel should be included in each area.

Following that were breakout sessions, where participants divided into groups and discussed among themselves what the most pressing issues were in each thematic area. The launch and