Dubai: The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has unveiled the “UNICEF Innocenti Youth Foresight Playbook,” on the the second day of the Dubai Future Forum (DFF) 2023.
This marks a significant breakthrough in UNICEF’s Youth Foresight Fellowship program, which seeks to engage young people in discussions about the future they will inherit as well as in the process of shaping and establishing policies for the future.
The publication was launched at DFF, the world’s largest gathering of futurists, taking place on November 27–28 at the Museum of the Future, under the patronage of Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Chairman of the Dubai Executive Council, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Dubai Future Foundation.
The UNICEF Innocenti Youth Foresight Playbook is a case study-based toolkit including 12 worksheets that offer tasks and activities to engage young people in foresight and decision-making. They are created for governments, foresight practitioners, and youth-led organizations, as well as think tanks and UN agencies.
In order to create a collaborative setting where young people are involved as equal partners in shaping their futures, the Playbook’s ultimate goal is to inspire young people and those who work with them to embrace foresight methods and tools and to make them accessible.
Mr. Bo Viktor Nylund, Director of UNICEF Innocenti, stated that, “Being guided by youth foresight not only helps UNICEF become a more anticipatory organization, but we hope that it will act as a catalyst for the meaningful engagement of young people in everything we do.”
Mr. Nylund emphasized the importance of using the imagination, energy, and inventiveness of the younger generation to envision, engineer, and create our future.