This side event celebrates the 20 th anniversary of the signing of the UNTOC and builds on that legacy by showcasing how education, particularly through lifelong learning opportunities, can empower youth and adults to address transnational organized crime.
Examples of good practices for the conceptualization, design and dissemination of educational tools on transnational organized crime at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels will be presented, igniting fruitful discussions and exchanges of views on the importance of quality education to promote and uphold the rule of law, with a particular focus on organized crime.
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.
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.
With the 2020/21 academic year in Uzbekistan kicking off in early-September, the country's Ministry of Public Education recently announced the launch of a new curriculum for primary schools. Among several new additions are lessons designed to provide children with learning opportunities centred around a strong educational framework that promotes fairness, justice and integrity in a fun and interactive way - a perfect fit for UNODC's friendly space characters, the Zorbs, and with it their messages around peace and justice.
Uzbekistan's new curriculum looks to use multimedia applications and interactive tools, drawing from both national and international educational knowledge.
While not exclusively a young person's area, information technology (IT) - including specifics such as artificial intelligence (AI), mobile app development and other emerging technologies - can be of particular interest for youth. At the same time, there is a growing interest among the younger generation in driving implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, taking advantage of opportunities to become social entrepreneurs. Indeed, according to the 2020 World Youth Report, "There is tremendous potential for young social entrepreneurs to utilize frontier technologies to tackle systemic social issues innovatively and effectively."
