Towards Promoting Youth Leadership Development in the Digital Era

The paper explored youth leadership development within the context of the rapidly evolving digital technologies and its attendant unprecedented impact on individuals, organizations and economies. Conceived as the “digital natives”, young people connect and access digital platforms to socialize, obtain information and seek entertainment regularly. The central theme of this paper is that integration of emerging and frontier technologies in youth development programmes creates opportunities to disseminate and scale up technological solutions that produce healthy youth with potential to contribute towards community betterment. Young people are reflections of the future of every society. Relying on descriptive method, it is established that the paradoxical nature of the cyber space provides prospects for social development but exposes youth to risks. Regardless of young people becoming digital being, hardly can they engage in independent thinking as they suffer deficit of rationality and responsibility on account of their addiction to internet. Based on this, it is suggested that policy makers sponsor digital literacy programmes, empower youth voice, promote adult-youth collaborative networks, support youth-led initiatives, incorporate young people in decision-making process that affect them, encourage critical thinking to develop digital solutions to real-life problems, design proactive, innovative and inclusive programmes for youth in the society such that surfing the internet would not make the youth to compromise their privacy, safety and integrity; and strengthen the roles of prime enablers of youth with a view to producing functional and responsible generation that contribute to strategic planning and governance process.