World Scouting hails adoption of UN Sustainable Development Goals

The World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM) congratulates the United Nations and its member states for the decision to adopt the new framework, Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This is indeed a historic step covering areas of critical importance for humanity and the planet.

It is important to recollect that Scouts from around the world have strongly contributed to the Post-2015 processes to help arrive at the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

Scouts participated actively in various consultations including country consultations that were jointly led by the UN and its member states; thematic consultations that were led by the UN agencies, and the MY World survey, UN’s crowdsourcing initiative. Several stories of how Scouts have engaged in the consultations have been reported on scout.org.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals under the broad areas of People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnership resonate well with the Scout Movement.

Under the umbrella of the World Scout Programmes, namely Messengers of Peace, World Scout Environment Programme, and Scouts of the World Award, Scouts have been actively contributing to the Millennium Development Goals over the last 15 years.

The journey will now embrace the Sustainable Development Goals for the next 15 years.

The 40 million Scouts in over 220 countries and territories in the world are actively engaging in creating positive changes in their local communities.

In just over two years of implementing our new flagship programme, “Messengers of Peace,” Scouts have already logged over 633 million service hours in over six million projects undertaken in their local neighbourhoods, communities, schools and parks.

And they are not stopping! Over the next five years, we envisage that Scouts worldwide will log an additional one billion hours of community service, including addressing environmental issues, engaging in peace efforts, and developing employability capacities.

This has been made possible as a result of the non-formal education approach the Movement has adopted to engage millions of young people all over the world.

Working with the UN and its agencies, and our partner organisations, we will continue to equip and develop our young people to be active, values-based, employable and peace-focused global citizens in creating a better world.

Scott A. Teare
Secretary General
World Organization of the Scout Movement