Book Launch: The Demographic Dividend and the Power of Youth – Voices from the Global Diplomacy Lab
Online, 29 January 2021, 3.30 – 5.30 pm CET
Edited by GDL members Eirliani, Elsa and Sonja and with contributions by many inspiring voices from the GDL and beyond, a compendium following up on the GDL 2019 curriculum findings has been published by Anthem Press. You can order it here.
The virtual Book Launch
On the day the book was published, the editors and initiators of the compendium - Elsa Marie D'Silva, Eirliani Abdul Rahman and Sonja Peteranderl invited authors and high-level officials to discuss the arguments of the book. Among them Dr Philipp Ackermann, Director‑General at the Federal Foreign Office, who signaled the interest to further collaborate on the topic.
Watch a short summary below and scroll down for more information on the Compendium itself!
Book Launch: The Demographic Dividend and the Power of Youth
The compendium
While the 2019 curriculum focused on Ghana, young people worldwide are crucial to fostering positive social, political, cultural, and economic change. Hence, members that participated in the Labs in Accra and Berlin applied the concepts to their own different backgrounds.
In their essays, they spotlight good practices of how governments and institutions can effectively manage and tap the demographic dividend for the success of all and highlights the role young people can play as actors of change. To name a few examples:
- Julia Jaroschewski elaborates on the fight of Rio de Janeiro's young generation, living in Favelas, against police violence.
- Kebba-Omar Jagne explains the chances of mobilizing human capital to harness the demographic dividend while drawing on the diaspora's role in The Gambia.
- ElsaMarie D'Silva addresses sexual violence in India and how the youth can play a vital role in changing the status quo.
- Sonja Peteranderl identifies ex-gang members in Los Angeles as drivers of change.
- Patrick Mpedzisi and Annegret Warth define the African continental youth policy as a tool for harnessing the demographic dividend.
- Rudrani Dasgupta tells her insights on digital mindfulness for Indian millennials.
- Elizabeth Maloba and Stefan Cibian stress the disparity of how societies in African states work compared to their governments.
- Colette Mazzucelli, together with her colleagues, revisit the youth's imperative of climate justice.
Further Events
Eirliani Abdul Rahman is co-founder of YAKIN (Youth, Adult Survivors & Kin In Need), an NGO working in the field of child rights and child protection issues, and a member of Twitter’s Safety & Trust Council. She is also Senior Assistant Director at the Singapore National Council of Social Service and has been seconded to head Operations and Programmes at Caregivers Alliance, a non-profit organisation that helps caregivers of those with mental health issues in Singapore.
In September 2015, the #FullStop to #childsexualabuse campaign that Eirliani led on behalf of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi reached 16 million people over six weeks. She won the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Award the same year.
Eirliani edited Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi’s book Will for Children, a collection of essays on child labour published in 2016. Her book on true accounts by survivors of child sexual abuse Survivors: Breaking the Silence on Child Sexual Abuse was published by Marshall Cavendish in 2017. It won joint second prize in the 2020 Golden Door Awards.
She also contributed a case study to the medical textbook Essentials of Global Health, co-edited by Babulal Sethia, Past President and Global Health Lead of the Royal Society of Medicine, which was published by Elsevier in London in 2018. The book won first prize in the Public Health category at the 2019 British Medical Association book awards.
Eirliani was in the Singapore Foreign Service from 2005 to 2015, serving in Berlin as First Secretary (Political) and then in Delhi as Political Counsellor. From June 2015 to November 2017, she was a member of the Advisory Council of the Global Diplomacy Lab. She is a Fellow of the London-based Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.
Eirliani lives in Singapore. She speaks Malay, English, German and Russian.
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Read more about Eirliani in her latest blog article. You can also read her articles about her polar expedition and about human trafficking and learn more about her work, activism and contribution to the Gender Alliance.
Elsa Marie D’Silva is the founder and CEO of Red Dot Foundation (Safecity), a platform that crowdsources personal experiences of sexual violence and abuse in public spaces. Since Safecity started in December 2012, it has become the largest crowd map on the issue in India, Kenya, Cameroon and Nepal.
Elsa Marie is an alumna of the US State Department’s Fortune Program, a fellow with Rotary Peace, Aspen New Voices and Vital Voices, and a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader. She is listed as one of BBC Hindi’s 100 Women. Moreover, she has won the Female Entrepreneur of the Year Award launched by Dušan Stojanović (European Angel Investor of the Year 2013) and the SheThePeople’s Digital Woman Award in Social Impact.
Prior to Safecity, she spent 20 years in the aviation industry, where she worked with Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines. In her last role in aviation, she was Vice President Network Planning.
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Read more about Elsa's work at Safecity and see for yourself in this documentary. She also has a very clear vision for the Global Diplomacy Lab.
Sonja Peteranderl is an editor at Spiegel Online and co-founder of BuzzingCities Lab, a think tank focusing on digitalisation and security/crime in informal settlements. She covers global politics, tech trends, security, justice and organised crime/cyber crime for example the global war on drugs, predictive policing, the digital transformation of drug cartels in Mexico or the European arms trade.
She has previously worked as a senior editor at Wired Germany magazine, and as a freelance foreign correspondent for German media such as Spiegel Online, Wired, Zeit Online, Impulse magazine or Journalist magazine in several Latin American countries, the USA and China.
As a fellow of the American Council on Germany, she is currently investigating the influence and the challenges of algorithmic decision-making systems/predictive policing in the policing and security realm in Germany and the USA. She is also an alumna of the Robert Bosch foundation's “Media Ambassadors China – Germany” programme, Otto-Brenner-Stiftung/Netzwerk Recherche and the foreign journalism programme of the German National Academic Foundation/Besser Foundation and has received several grants for her international investigations.
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Read more about Sonja in this blog post and in this article.
