From Users to Co-Architects: Advancing ICPD Commitments for and with Youth in a Digital Age (CPD59 Side Event).
This side event of the fifty-ninth session of the Commission on Population and Development (CPD59) seeks to sustain the momentum of the Cotonou Youth Action Agenda and the 2024 ICPD30 Global Dialogue on Technology, emphasizing that a digital future must be equitable and co-engineered with the people who navigate it daily. The implementation of the ICPD Programme of Action is now inextricably linked to the rapid evolution of technology, research, and development (R&D). As digital platforms increasingly mediate how young people access information, health services, and civic participation, these spaces have become the infrastructure of rights realization. Consequently, exclusion from the design and deployment of these systems is an exclusion from rights. While approximately 79 per cent of people aged 15 to 24 globally use the Internet, they frequently encounter censorship of health information, algorithmic suppression of gender equality content, and technology-facilitated...