In our evolving, hyper-connected world, the complex challenges that face the international community, can never be understood and efficiently tackled without the necessary attention to the voices of today’s youth.

The COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated the obstacles to young people’s access to meaningful engagements with the international community, and caused a negative impact on a fair, just and ethical contribution of youth to the world’s major problems, including corruption.

At UNODC we believe that all young people should have the chance to express their ideas and concerns regarding integrity, ethics and anti-corruption matters, in a way that tangibly influences global policy dialogues. No solution to corruption can be sustainable, scalable, and efficient in terms of channelling inter-generational progress, without the participation of those who will be the very recipients of those same solutions. Therefore, in order to help youth realizing their rightful and decisive role in the making of policies that will concretely affect their future, we want to harness young people’s ideas and perspectives and meaningfully integrate them within our youth-related work.

For this reason UNODC’s GRACE initiative – or Global Resources for Anti-Corruption Education and Youth Empowerment – established the “YouthLED” Integrity Advisory Board. This will bring together a group of 25 talented young people, willing to closely work with the GRACE Team in advancing education and youth empowerment as a key tool to prevent and fight corruption locally, regionally and globally.