Over the past 8 weeks, Go1 co-founder and COO Chris Eigeland has been in New York City fulfilling his duties as the Australian Youth Representative to the United Nations, culminating in presenting at the United Nations General Assembly.
During his time, in New York Chris has had the opportunity to attend a number of high-level forums covering diversity, innovation and youth, as well as being invited to speak as a part of Peace Day on Friday, September 16.
Prior to beginning his UN journey, Chris first travelled across all of the states and territories within Australia and spoke with more than 5,000 young Australians to understand their priority issues so he could include them in his address.
Now that he has delivered his address, Chris reflects on his time with other United Nations delegates, and what he learned from the experience.
“Last year the UN set the agenda for the next 15 years in terms of social economic culture development. It was increasingly clear throughout my tenure at the UN that in order to achieve the ambitious goals such as educating every person of primary to high school age in ending extreme poverty, we’re relying more and more on the largest human generation to ever exist.
The key part of that will be how we approach the education question from a primary education perspective, rather than how we correct skills for the industries and economies in the future. One area that the UN is relying more and more is private sector and start-ups working to solve this problem.”
What do you think you learned from being in and around in that environment for 3 to 4 weeks throughout that process around government officials and so on from a range of countries all over the world.
We need to remember that government and international government systems like the UN don't have all the answers, and relying on small enterprises to think outside the box can really help to solve some of these problems.
The disparity in trying to provide this sort of opportunity is proving to be more challenging for UN members in areas of the world.”
