International Youth Day

On Monday 12 August the United Nations (UN) celebrated International Youth Day. The 2024 IYD theme is ‘From Clicks to Progress: Youth Digital Pathways for Sustainable Development’.

The UN is highlighting their Sustainable Development Goals in association with this year’s event. “At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries - developed and developing - in a global partnership. They recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests".

The UN’s Secretary-General, António Guterres, has said, “Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals requires a seismic shift – which can only happen if we empower young people and work with them as equals”.

For 2024 IYD, the UN states that, “digitalization is transforming our world, offering unprecedented opportunities to accelerate sustainable development. Digital technologies such as mobile devices, services, and artificial intelligence are instrumental in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Data generated from digital interactions supports evidence-based decision-making. With profound impact across economic, social and environmental dimensions, digital technologies and data contribute to at least 70 per cent of the 169 SDG targets while potentially reducing the cost of achieving these goals by up to USD 55 trillion. Young people are leading the charge in digital adoption and innovation, with three-quarters of those aged 15 to 24 using the internet in 2022, a rate higher than other age groups.”

ACU’s research regularly focuses on improving our understanding of young people’s lives and addressing the challenges that they face. Our research presenting findings at the intersection of youth demographics and digital tools and interventions can be found across the health, education, sociology disciplines. Open access articles from the institutional repository, Research Bank, allow the global community to benefit from our research.

The physical and mental health of Australian youths has been supported by the findings of these articles:

• ‘Developing a Theory of Change for a Digital Youth Mental Health Service (Moderated Online Social Therapy) : Mixed Methods Knowledge Synthesis Study’
• Activity accumulation and cardiometabolic risk in youth : A latent profile approach
• The youth online training and employment system : Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial of an online vocational intervention for young people with mental ill health

Considerations for youth wellbeing isn’t limited to their health. The following articles present findings on social, educational, and environmental supports and improvement:

• Australian Muslim identities and the question of intra-Muslim dialogue
• Coding and computational thinking across the curriculum : A review of educational outcomes
• Fostering social sustainability through intergenerational engagement in Australian neighborhood parks

Open access publications allow broader readership for ACU research. You can read these full texts and more of ACU’s research discussing youth and digital interventions in the institutional repository, ACU Research Bank.