The meaningful participation of youth, especially students, in the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda creates completely new perspectives. To this end, UN Women supports higher education institutions in integrating WPS topics into the curricula of relevant academic programmes.

In order to achieve equality and fulfil UN objectives for sustainable development, UN Women presented the global campaign “Generation Equality: Realizing women’s rights for an equal future” for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

The six-day “How to Start a Business” course taught women in Georgia how to generate start-up ideas and validate them, as well as how to build the right team and create a product. They also developed strategic and innovative thinking, and learned about planning and product distribution, financial documentation, business modeling and investment proposals.

Inspired by programming for the past eight years, 17-year-old Mariam Lomtadze is the founder of Looper and tech start-ups Hero and FarmApp. Currently working on developing Android mobile apps while taking a gap year after graduating high school, Mariam participated in a hackathon to find innovative ways to visualise gender data at the UN Women-supported regional conference Gender Statistics.

Reaching out to young people is an essential part of promoting women and men’s equal opportunities and fighting gender-based discrimination in the long term. Supporting their innovative ideas may transform the workplace into a better environment for all.