Youth Voice is one of the advocacy interventions that integrated the core mission of Youth for Youth related to the sexual and reproductive health of young people within the big framework of global policies. Problems and needs of young people become the problems and needs of future adults – working adults and parents.

As an organization, we were strongly supported by the United Nations through the Romanian programme of United Nations Fund for Population – UNFPA until Romania became an EU member state. Thus, we were permanently in contact and thought on the understanding of MDGs and after 2015, on SDGs.

Youth Voice provided us with the opportunity of bringing together those young representatives of youth, training them on the 2030 Agenda, on how to include it in their own organizations and activities and also how to further promote it within advocacy campaigns. A great asset was in this extent the involvement of UN Youth Romanian representatives, as the project provided them with direct contact with a very diverse population of young people and thus with a better understanding of their needs and solutions to be advocated to governments and international institutions.

We are well aware that Romania (at the level of decision-makers) is still at the very beginning of understanding MDGs and SDGs, even if there are institutions with clear and specific responsibilities on the 2030 Agenda (Department of Sustainable Development – directly under the General Secretary of Government, established in 2017, and prior to that, a Parliamentarian sub-committee within the Romanian Senate). But also, we are aware that understanding and implementing SDGs within national legislation, strategies, programmes is a process that needs long-term vision, commitment, good data from research, adequate assessment of national/ European/ global needs of population, capacity to project and, moreover, strong democratic instruments. For all these, we should be honest to admit that we are still in the process of achieving them and that the efforts of NGOs sometimes do not reach the expected results at the highest level.