Sport can be a powerful tool to engage youth and promote positive values, building resilience to violence, crime and substance use. With this in mind, UNODC's 'Line Up Live Up' initiative has been rolled across the world in recent years, offering a sports-based, life skills training curriculum designed to help young people in vulnerable settings.
Most recently, Line Up Live Up, part of the Youth Crime Prevention through Sport initiative under the Doha Declaration Global Programme, partnered with UNESCO and the Ministry of Public Health of Lebanon to organize a four-day Training of Trainers in Beirut.
One of the many impacts of containment measures, including confinement, is the limitation of young people's participation in public life and sports events. Indeed, these were often part of their pre-pandemic daily routine and as has been observed, society's most vulnerable are often those most affected by the dramatic decrease in participation opportunities.
To counter this in Kyrgyzstan, UNODC and the Ministry of Education and Science recently partnered to provide children and youth across the country with opportunities for positive engagement and to foster physical activity and social inclusion during COVID-19.
One such opportunity was the Line Up Live Up online challenge, a video competition organized during the month of July.
A joint UNESCO-UNODC partnership working to promote the rule of law through education is launching a series of virtual regional dialogues to bring young people together with policymakers to hear what they want from education and justice systems in the post COVID-19 future.
The dialogues will focus on Central America, South Asia and Europe and the Middle East and North Africa and will seize the opportunity for change offered by the pandemic to build discussion among young people, policy-makers, educators and representatives from education and justice sectors to engage them in building back better.
UNODC and the world football's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to step up their joint cooperation to address threats to sport posed by crime.
The MoU, which was signed at UNODC's Vienna-based headquarters by UNODC Executive Director Ghada Waly and FIFA President Gianni Infantino during the 'Tackling Corruption and Crime in and through Sport' event, also pledges to consider ways in which football can be used as a vehicle to strengthen youth resilience to crime and substance use through the provision of life-skills training.
Worldwide, schooling in 2020 has been marked by unprecedented interruptions to children's learning and teacher's efforts to educate. With COVID-19 first leading to school closures, and later to social distancing measures, the pandemic has forced educational systems to adapt and develop new ways of learning, as well as identify solutions to mobilize youth remotely. In West Africa, where the COVID-19 reaction measures reflect much of the rest of the world, one of the ways this is now being achieved is through the region's first educational television station, Télé-Ecole, with whom UNODC recently partnered.
