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Conference day I – 7 January 2013 After a very early start on the first day of the conference, the youth delegates from China, Japan, Mongolia and Korea make their way out to Korea University on a cold Monday morning in Seoul. The opening speech and the introductions set out the agenda for the upcoming three days. “You are the leaders of the future because you already are leaders today. We need to hear from you what concerns you have, what goals you have and what the international community needs to work on.” With this spirit, the young participants break out into groups after introducing their country teams and start discussing what needs to be done to get from the MDGs toward the #post2015 agenda.

Ai Ichimura (from Japan – working group 1): “We have a very diverse group here with refugees, people with disabilities, people from many different cultural backgrounds so we have to find common grounds but also focus on individual needs and demands. The countries in North East Asia share many things like economic growth, problems with inequality and other social problems. To make sure the declaration

we are working on is good, we need to do our homework, find evidence in number and figures that need to be improved and then come up with clear recommendations.”

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Clara Suh from Korea summarizes the group 3 discussion as follows: “The discussion proceeded with focus on prioritizing the areas to address for the post-2015 development framework, as well as trying to identify specific ways to implement the desired goals. It was agreed that the goals should remain realistic. Especially while recognizing overarching philosophy and goals for development, the country-specific factors should be taken into account in order to prevent misinterpretation of achievements. Inequality was among the one of the critical issues to be address for the post-2015 development framework. Gender inequality, education opportunity, and income inequality are the specific areas that were agreed as common agenda among different country participants. Expanding education opportunity was discussed with regard to the employment opportunities. As much as expansion of education opportunity is important, guarantee of quality education and opportunities for vocational job training that would lead to more employment opportunities is important.” Fan Popo (from China – working group 4: “I didn't expect that the gender issue would be talked about so much in our group. But once it started, everyone was really interested. Especially now that we are in a country with a new female president. The Mongolian participants shared that women are actually better educated than the men in their country. And one of the Chinese girls talked about inequality of education resources in China. The Korean team shared their ideas about female politicians. What I said was that there are not only two genders, there are a lot of gender identities

and they should be equal. We also reflected on the MDGs and whether they were a success or not. Here the participants had different opinions, because if you compare with the past, it already changed a lot, but when you compare it with our goals for the future, there is still a long way to go. This is still not the world we want. I look forward to a world with much more diversity!” Kong Qingling, also from China and working group 4, adds: “We had an exciting and visionary discussion on the first day to identify the strengths as well as the weaknesses of the MDGs. Our key points are related to topics such as global development partnership, developmental project assessment and emerging challenges like climate change.”