Conferences/Big Events

Conferences & Big Events

The Department of Youth Services has always seen the need for youth empowerment. While this is ensured in our daily activities and trainings, there are bigger events that have not only put our country on the map, but has also maximized opportunities for young people to express their needs in inclusivity as it relates to leadership matters.

Below are past international youth conferences and events that DYS has led or co-led within the last 5 years:

Caribbean Youth Leader's Summit 2016

The Caribbean Youth Leaders Summit aimed to provide a unique opportunity for young leaders, youth development practitioners, academics and policymakers to meet together to discuss research and programming priorities and capacity building workshops for youth in the Agenda 2030: Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Participants from across the Caribbean region and the wider world offered speeches, research papers, training workshops, assessments of good practice and cultural presentations at the Summit.

World Youth Conference 2017

The World Youth Conference 2017 convened national, regional and international youth leaders under the theme: "Globally running to 2030, Becoming Sustainably Strong". It provided a platform for youth leaders to evaluate the past, by tasking

participants to acquire knowledge of their countries commitments to the Sustainable Developments Goals and their respective implementation strategies. What concluded from that was the Mahogany Declaration that formed realistic guidelines for our youth organizations and overall countries could use to facilitate the goals of the SDGs by 2030.

See document here:

The Mahogany Declaration

Youth Mainstreaming 2019

The Department of Youth Services partnered with the Commonwealth Secretariat to put in place a strategy for youth mainstreaming in Belize.
Youth mainstreaming is a coordinated, all-of-government approach that enables equitable, social, economic, political and ecological outcomes for young people. This required strategic youth sector initiatives that engage comprehensively and substantively with holistic, youth-centric planning processes, and that brings young people’s aspirations and voices to the forefront in national planning.