UK celebrates Commonwealth Day 2020 with Bangladeshi youths

With the theme, 'Delivering a common future', Commonwealth Day 2020 was celebrated worldwide recently. This year, the Commonwealth highlighted how the 54 member countries in the Commonwealth family are 'Innovating, Connecting and Transforming' to help achieve some of their biggest goals, like protecting natural resources and boosting trade.

The British High Commission in Bangladesh celebrated the Commonwealth Day by hosting an event with different youth organisations this year. British High Commissioner Robert Chatterton Dickson hosted the event in his Dhaka residence, with an aim to include youth participation in achieving the common goals.  

"We would love young people in Bangladesh to contribute and it is an opportunity for them to talk about what they need in Bangladesh," said the High Commissioner. "We believe that the Commonwealth is a forward-thinking organisation, which picks up enthusiasm and ideas and turns them into global concerns."

Bangladeshi Commonwealth Network, Chevening scholars, British Council Active Citizens and members of FameLab, Jaago Foundation, Youth Opportunity, BYLC and several other organisations, participated in the event.

Three discussion sessions on education, climate action and cultural & social pluralism brought out major challenges and ways to cope with them. Three focus groups worked on these three issues and came up with several slogans and banners, which will be featured in Commonwealth Youth Forum (CYF) 2020 in Rwanda.

The interactive discussion sessions shed light on some serious issues in our society, such as religious barriers, lack of critical thinking abilities, lack of empathy, identity crisis, political violence, religious extremism and others. The participants suggested various ways to solve these problems through inter-religion communication, study of empathy, change in education curriculum and many others. The participants believe that government and other international organisations play the most important part in addressing these problems by policy making and strictly following those guidelines.

At the event, slogans like, "Tolerance for sustainable future", "Promoting Religious Harmony", "Finance for Climate Justice", and "Learn Empathy and Build Inclusive Society", reflected the youth's quest for peace and harmony.