Unicef offers youth a voice

Students and young people have been using the Internet to send messages to the world leaders gathered in Copenhagen for the World Summit for Social Development.

Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, has set up an interactive electronic youth forum on the World Wide Web because it believes young people should have a say in the summit.

The summit meeting, which opened on Monday, has been seeking solutions to the problems of poverty, unemployment and social conflict. Neither Britain, the United States nor Russia has sent its head of state.

There is still time for young people to send messages of no more than 250 words through the Internet to Copenhagen, where the "social summit" ends on Sunday.

Delegates will be able to read the messages on computer terminals or see them on a "Voices of Youth Wall". Unicef asks for college, gender, age (under 25), email address and country in messages.

The email address is unicefwssd@igc.apc.org and the Web pages can be found at http://www.iisd.ca/linkages/un/youth.html