Thank you editor,

Just a thought. I think another way of addressing the underlying concept for youth parliament is education for citizenship. That is, to include education for citizenship into our national school curriculum. Either it is integrated into the social sciences or become a subject of its own. Many countries have such subject integrated into their national or school curricula.

I like to think that it will be money well spent if we develop into our national curriculum framework the notion of citizenship or restrengthen it if its already existed. At its core, education for citizenship is all about developing our young people from a very early age to exercise their rights and responsibilities in contributing to making informed decisions at various levels starting from classrooms, schools, communities and etc. This can be done in many ways. For example, students can be encouraged to participate in making decisions concerning the school programs, or in developing strategies on how to interact with wider communities. Participate in raising awareness about sustainable development, social equity, respect, peace and conflict resolution, climate change etc.

Other opportunities such as, students can have field trips to the parliament during parliamentary sessions then write and share their essays about their reflections. In using speech contests, the winning students can share their winning essays about national or global issues during national events such as Independence Day, Queen's birthday or even during a parliamentary session and etc, etc. Money can be used as approved grants for schools or students in undertaking such projects.

By the way such innovations can also be applied to our our civic youth populations by way of informal or in non formal education sector. Or through other initiatives.

Finally, I think, just recently, one of our own locals did his Masters degree in the idea of education for citizenship in Solomon Islands. I hope his work and maybe others can be used to develop such concept for our young Solomon Islanders within our education system. Tagio tumas.