Emerging Public Leaders Amplifies Youth Voices and Need for Inclusion at the Summit of the Future and Other Events at the UNGA

New York - Over a week, on the margins of the 79th United Nations General Assembly in New York, our Executive Director, alongside staff members and our Board Chair shared the impact of our program model on governance and ethical leadership with key stakeholders and prospective partners to drive program awareness, advocate for better resource allocation and increase gender, diversity and inclusion practices. 

Beginning the week, our team attended the Summit of the Future Action Days. Young professionals serving as national and community leaders flooded the United Nations headquarters advocating for the next generation, impressing upon world leaders the importance of increasing meaningful youth participation as the key decision-makers of the future, and making recommendations to improve the commitments outlined in the Pack for the Future. 

Emerging Public Leaders’ Executive Director, Abigail Kajumba noted that the Action Days were purposefully more youth-led than any conference she has attended and emphasized the importance of youth representation across the public sector. “Governance isn’t just about leadership, but also about representation, many youth who should be in the room today are absent. Why is that? As Emerging Public Leaders we continue to try and get youth in the room and both today's and tomorrow's leaders in shaping the future that they ultimately own.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the concerns of young leaders present in an open dialogue - part of the #YouthLead sessions of the Action Days. He highlighted key issues youth will continue to face along their career journeys, many that EPL similarly addresses in our training, and the commitment of the UN to build sustainable mechanisms to transform internal processes from youth-influenced to youth-led.

“A central aspect of the summit of the future and the reforms we talk about is how can we guarantee that young people especially participate in the decision-making process everywhere. Another thing that is essential is to have more young people working inside the organization. We need to have more young people working daily there where the documents are being prepared, to make sure that the kind of  product that comes from the different areas and departments of the organization is much more adaptive of the needs and to the interests of young people than what it is today.” - UN Secretary-General António Guterres

As evidence of this commitment, the Pact of the Future, signed on September 21st, included the first-even Declaration on Future Generation, from the recommendations of the youth leaders. It outlines steps to meaningfully increase youth participation as decision-makers in global conversations and scaffolds the involvement of future generations of emerging leaders. 

The Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection of Liberia, Hon. Gbeme Horace-Kollie spoke about the President’s Young Professionals Program (PYPP), our foundational program, on a panel during the Summit of the Future Actions Days. PYPP recently celebrated 15 years of meritocratic recruitment and strategic technical development of young professionals, in partnership with the Civil Service Agency of Liberia. Since 2009, more than 200 young Liberia leaders have been enrolled in government positions after completing the training, many of whom are women. 

Hon. Horace-Kollie noted a recent shift in the PYPP, reflective of our commitment to further address barriers to women’s entry into public service stating, “Right now the current enrollment is around 57.1 percent and it shows that we are moving upward.” 

Testimonies such as that from the Hon. Horace-Kollie, aided conversations during the week with critical partners advocating for bold solutions to increase the availability of resources, to enhance and expand locally driven programming across Africa. Bridgespan further addressed the need in an event co-hosted by the Ford Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), and CorpsAfrica, presenting their research conducted on large African NGOs in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. They found that 90 percent of large African NGOs in the surveyed regions were dependent on international, restricted funds from outside Africa for a majority of their budget. 

Offering our training curriculum and mentorship module to more African young professionals entering the public sector with an emphasis on dismantling barriers to women, people with disabilities and other minority groups is a critical goal by 2025. Simultaneously, we hope to deepen our impact in our current countries of programming by partnering with key stakeholders to develop sub-national training and online training modules of our proven responsive training curriculum. Sharing these objectives with partners and champions throughout the week built pathways and networks to continue the pursuit of necessary resources and specialists in line with our goals.

Throughout the week, our Executive Director, Abigail Kajumba, and our Board Chair, Betsy Williams, attended events with key partners to increase awareness of our ongoing work to develop critical local leadership, advocate for better resource allocation and action networks to facilitate better access for women, people with disabilities, and marginalized groups in public service leadership. 

Meeting with our Government partners from Malawi and new partners from the Governments of Zambia and Sierra Leone provided critical insight into their strategic plans that will enable our programs to work seamlessly aside national goals and targets, getting more young leadership into civil service and scaling up local leadership capacity. 

Concluding the week with a reception hosted by CorpAfrica. Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Former President of the Republic of Liberia and our Chair Emeritus, was honored with the CorpsAfrica Inspiration Aware, and Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield shared remarks about the valor and integrity of African youth and their dedication to driving equitable prosperity. As a Co-Founder of PYPP and a long-time champion of the program respectively, their commitment to youth leaders has helped drive the impact of our more than 400 alumni serving their communities and changing the governance landscape from the bottom up in Liberia, Ghana, Kenya, and those we will soon welcome in Malawi. 

Our fellows are the cornerstone of tomorrow's ethical leadership, who promote peaceful democracies and support the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 16 - Peace Justice and Strong Institutions. They are the frontlines of change in good governance and rebuilding trust in public policy. It is for their continued success and the sustainability of the next generation of ethical and innovative public servants that we continue the pursuit of the SDGs and the delivery of the Pact of the Future through the implementation of our programming.