IGF 2021 Global Youth Summit

The Global Youth Summit is a traditional IGF session which facilitates dialogue between young people and senior stakeholders on Internet governance matters of youth’s priority. During the IGF 2019 in Berlin and online IGF 2020, the summit resulted in several concrete action points added to the youth voices to resonate more clearly in the Internet governance ecosystem.

The aim of this year’s Global Youth Summit is to build on the experience of previous editions and move one step forward. Therefore, the summit aims at delivering points of action as youth postulates of specific solutions to the challenges they observe in different areas of Internet Governance. The role of adopting this approach is to highlight the role of young people in digital policy-making and foster their engagement.

This year’s Global Youth Summit is intended to be particularly significant. Firstly, it will gather many high-level participants, including from United Nations, European Commission and the IGF 2021 Host Country Polish Government, who will interact with young people coming from all over the world. Secondly, the Global Youth Summit will be preceded by several preparatory events, including the final one hosted during the first week of December, where youth from all over the world will have an opportunity to discuss the action points to be presented and further discussed at the Summit.

The Global Youth Summit will conclude with an award ceremony of the Wiki Youth, an open contest that aims to engage young people on initiatives that actively contribute to a more relevant Internet for all its users, choosing as an example the Wikimedia Foundation's open database project that integrates other wiki projects.

Elvis Presley once sang: “A little less conversation, a little more action”. Having those words in mind, let’s work together for the Global Youth Summit to be a forum where a lot of brilliant thoughts and observations by young people will be shared, and an elevator to push them into action.

The Summit’s discussions will develop around several policy questions:

1) What challenges do young people observe in the following areas?

• Universal access and meaningful connectivity
• Digital education
• Environmental sustainability and climate change
• Inclusive IG ecosystems and digital cooperation
• Emerging regulation (market structure, content, data and consumer/users rights regulation)
• Cybersecurity, Privacy and data protection and Artificial Intelligence
• What opportunities do young people recognise to tackle the challenges mentioned above?
• How young people could contribute to digital policy-making processes at local, national or international levels?

2) What opportunities do young people recognise to tackle the challenges mentioned above?‎

3)  How young people could contribute to digital policy-making processes at local, national or ‎international levels?‎

4) How young people could deliver successful advocacy and engage other stakeholders in ‎supporting their initiatives and local ecosystems?‎

AGENDA