A dozen young students entered the stage and started rapping a hip-hop song about climate change to the applause of three-thousand peers in the Bogota Sports Arena. This brought the 2018 session of SIMONU to a close.
Only six years after its creation by UN Information Centre (UNIC) Bogota and the city’s Board of Education, SIMONU has become the largest Model United Nations in the world. It innovates in many ways to provide the students of Colombia’s capital with a prestigious forum for open discussion and interaction.
This year, one of the new features of Bogota’s Model UN was a conference organized in the Sumapaz Paramo, a locality that, while part of the Bogota district, is 75% rural. More than 150 students from twelve high schools set up camp on the moorland, five hours away from the bustling city, for three days of UN simulation.
A few weeks later, they joined the urban conference with 3100 other participants. The two days of debates addressed national and international issues, such as human rights, climate change, peace and security, migration, and sustainable development. They agreed on the final conclusions which they compiled into a Security Council-like report.
“Model UNs are a great way to get started with the UN. They are an opportunity to see how diplomacy works, and to begin the journey to becoming global citizens,” said Alison Smale, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, in a video message to the SIMONU participants.
The 1.8 billion young people in the world today are the agents of change who will take on the great challenges that we need to face as a global community.
“Each of you represents hope – hope for a fairer, more sustainable, more peaceful world,” Hélène Papper, director of the UN Information Centre for Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, reminded the thousands of students sitting on the bleachers of the famous stadium.
Two years after the Peace Accord with the FARC-EP, Colombia is still in the process of building a sustainable peace. The youth will be key in this process.
As Paula, one of the young SIMONU rapporteurs, pointed out: “To progress, we need to educate.”