On the occasion of the Third Summit for Democracy, Club de Madrid and the European Partnership for Democracy brought together representatives from the WYDE Civic Engagement Network of Young Decision-Makers and the Youth Democracy Cohort for a side-event session. The participants shared their experiences as young political leaders in promoting political participation in Democracies from the Global South, specifically from Africa, Asia, and the Latin American-Caribbean region.
These young leaders have vast experience in increasing the levels of participation of younger sectors of the population in their respective countries, navigating and addressing authoritarian tendencies, and understanding the influence of new technologies and digitalisation in democratic processes such as elections, referendums, etc. This combination of expertise and varied geographical origin provided an ideal platform for sharing lessons learnt during their careers before an audience of democratic defenders and government decision-makers. They also used this platform to identify new challenges and share recommendations on the main theme of ‘Youth and Technology’. The key messages identified not only served to strengthen the outputs of the Summit for Democracy but will also be shared in other platforms and processes where Club de Madrid and the European Partnership for Democracy are involved.
This Network of Young decision-makers is composed of a group of exceptional young leaders under 35 years’ old who are active in politics and in decision-making bodies and who have already reached positions of influence from which they are advocating for greater youth political participation.
* For more information, please contact Laura Flores (lflores@clubmadrid.org).