Youth in Action: Global Youth Action Plan – Part III

In this episode we speak with Youth Policy Board members Feyisayo Akande, Sarah Kohane and Elif Menderes about their journey, key achievements on the Global Youth Action Plan, and how young people can get involved in shaping a more sustainable food future.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:02

Hello and welcome to the World Food Forum Podcast, part of our Youth in Action series. In this series, we bring you stories and insights from young leaders who are driving change in global agri-food systems. I'm Alexandra, your host, and today we are continuing with episode three, the final part of our series on the Global Youth Action Plan. In this episode, we will be talking with three members of the Youth Policy Board Feishayo Akande, Sarah Kohane, and Elif Menderes. They will share what inspired them to join, their experience representing their region, and the key achievements they made so far, and their vision for the Youth Assembly in 2026. We'll also hear how young people and organizations can get involved and support these initiatives. So stay tuned as we explore the incredible work of young leaders leading the way for a sustainable and equitable other food systems. So stay tuned as we explore the incredible work of youth leading the way for sustainable and equitable food future. Hello and welcome. Thank you for being here with us. Happy to have you here. And before we start, I would like to ask you if you could shortly introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Okay, um, my name is Faye Shayo Akonte, and I'm from Nigeria. I have the honor to represent the African region for the Youth Policy Board today.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Hello, this is Elif Mendelez. I am from Turkey and based in Istanbul. I am the Youth Policy Board Europe and Central Asia Regional Leads. Happy to hear.

SPEAKER_03 1:38

Thank you. Thank you both. So first of all, I want to ask you what actually inspired you to join Youth Policy Board? What was that? What happened actually to bring that spark if you wanted to apply and become a member?

SPEAKER_02 1:51

I would say for me, it's for my personal experience as a woman and a young person in Africa. I've witnessed first-hand challenges women face in Africa when it comes to like agriculture, the food system, getting access to finance, funding, and even support system from families and friends. And then for me also, it's also about the bridging the gap between science, policy, and farmers. So I want to like kind of be the voice of the voiceless and um to be at the table to speak up because if no one should speak, then I guess I should do that for every other person.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

For me, this story may sound quite familiar, but I for my master's degree I studied energy and sustainable development. And back then I discovered that I'm losing my tone to ties with the soil. I mean the physically, because I was born and raised in Istanbul. Although I was traveling quite often to my hometown in Bilexi and also the hometown of my husband in Trace. Then I thought maybe it's the right time to work on and focus on it. Considering my background, the policy part was the best part to access the topic. Then slowly I find myself as a young female farmer, and I see my future there. I don't want to spend my entire life or the let's say the white colour worker. I want to turn back to my bones and I want to feel the soil and I want to continue on that field. And that's what motivates me for be a member of the youth policy board.

SPEAKER_00 3:28

Um, so yeah, good morning, everyone. Hello, everyone. I'm Sarah, Sarah Kohane. I'm from the Youth Policy Board from the Europe and Central Asia region. Um and I'm also very proud to be here with my colleague Alif. Um, we've been working in the past months very hardly to put in uh in practice or in action what actually the last cohort uh wrote or what they um what they saw as really huge challenges in our region. Um yeah, and how I arrived to the youth policy board. Uh so I have a very good friend of mine, Marilena, who was here in the cohort of last year. And I really saw that she was really engaged uh at FAO. She was really uh having all these meetings with very intelligent, very um driven young people. And I thought maybe that's also what I want to do. And um I've been working in the past years mainly um on Germany, on German policies, and I've been working as a researcher for the German um for the German institute, like a research institution for the German Ministry of Agriculture and Food. So I was mainly uh doing political advisory to the German uh in the German context. And for me, it was really interesting to see like coming from this national perspective and bringing it a bit on the global perspective and um interacting with other very motivated, um, very uh intelligent young people that are uh driving change around the world and that also uh we share this mission of transforming hungry food systems and like doing our small part in this uh system. So I was really eager to bring it from this like local German perspective and then interact with the other members of our region, of our um Europe and Central Asia region to see what are challenges that other young people face in our region. Um as Elif said, it's a very diverse region, just so many young people that we are trying to represent in this uh youth policy board. Yeah, and that's uh why it has been uh like my motivation to get involved, to also bring in the German perspective and um yeah, get in contact with a lot of very motivated uh young people.

SPEAKER_03 5:42

It's so inspiring to see uh young women being part of youth policy board members because many young people are actually not having opportunity to go directly to the formal channels to influence decision-making policies, no. And the youth policy board acting as a as let's say parliament, no, where it's giving opportunity and representing people from all the different regions from all around the world and giving them place to influence uh decision making. Uh, it's so inspiring to see you to see you both here. So you're also having an experience and here in the youth policy board, representing your region, bringing up all the all the issues, uh challenges, opportunities that you're facing in your regions, and shaping also global youth action plan. How was that going? Was it was it hard to actually distinguish, target all the challenges, opportunities?

SPEAKER_02 6:34

Yeah, we're getting experience. It's been amazing, I would say. It's been challenging, also like inspiring. I'm new as a member of the policy board, but over the past couple of months, I've seen people from different regions from different continents collaborating together just for one goal, which is like transforming agri-food system. So this is beautiful to see how collaboration can be done. And I'm going to talk from the perspective of the African region. So, for the African region, it's really amazing when we had the AgriVoid series, and then we had over 400 people on Zoom, and this serves as an inspiration for me because they look to us as we have a problem, and you can solve this problem for us. You are there for us to speak on behalf of every other person. So this is really inspiring to see them on Zoom that day, and then at the flagship we friends today, it's so amazing. Um, when we had the African Roundtable session, people, the consultation, how people talk about the challenges they are facing. And moving forward from there is about how the U Policy Board works together to make these documents that will be transferred to the higher hub. And this is amazing to see the whole process like from the groundwork to you listening to them and then taking these compendium documents down to the higher hub. So for me, it's really good experience, and I love it so far.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

We are covering a diverse region, which is Europe and Central Asia. It's most of the time the most challenging part, the priorities in Europe region are not the same priorities, exactly the same priorities in Central Asia. That was the first challenge to be solved for us. But I think with the last four years and also the online physical consultations that we had over these years, uh came to a conclusion that there are also things that we can create a solution together. Of course, it's not possible to solve the entire issues, but I think we did our best for it. So it's also really great to see many people from our region at the flagship. Uh, I'm really happy and proud that I was the first one from Turkey as a policy board member, but this year I brought uh different delegations, different youngsters from my country, and right now they also have a really huge interest. And I we as a region also really well presented. We have colleagues from Ireland, from Germany, from Switzerland, then Turkey, then Azerbaijan, then Kazakhstan. I think uh we are doing our best to present our region to also find the uh solutions to joint programs and also encourage youngsters to tackle with the agriculture-related issues.

SPEAKER_03 9:31

But I wanted to ask you so, as you already published uh Global Youth Action Plan, and we have opportunity to go search for it on our World Food Forum website, and people have opportunity also to look through it, look at different um different perspectives and different, uh let's say, highlights. So, what are some of the achievements that you're most proud of so far?

SPEAKER_00 9:53

So, yeah, what we've been doing the past month was mainly working on our first target topic, which is um the topic of food loss in Western Europe. Um, and what we have done so far, we uh collected or we launched like a call for um to establish a network, a stakeholder network with different people that work on the topic of food loss uh within our region. Um, young people that drive change, that work in different uh fields, that come from academics, from a lot of youth organizations, um and that already work on this topic of food loss. And our first idea was to establish this um this network, this stakeholder network, and then um yeah, just like gather a lot of different um different uh voices and different ideas that are already out there, and that youth is already driving change in this topic. So um that was our first step. We established this network with 31 members. Um we already had some meetings with them, and we're yeah, also trying to get them engaged in our um sessions that we are organizing in the next months. So that's also like this co-creation process that we really want to bring in these voices from other people and from other organizations that are already doing a lot in this field. Um, and then what we also did, we had a first capacity building session on the topic of food loss because we realized that the topic of food laws is a topic that still needs a lot of awareness among young people. So we started with uh the first session on um just understanding a bit what is the concept of food loss, where does it occur? How are like what are like points for action where also youth can get engaged? Where does it occur mainly? Well, it's I mean it's from the topic of food losses until the gate of the consumers, so it's um mainly on the farmers um on the farming uh side and also the processing parts in between. So um there are like a lot of points where food loss occurs, and uh also a lot of like points for solution where uh where we can come in.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

I totally agree what Sarah says. Let me start with this note. I'm personally proud of the synergy that we are creating among our uh stakeholder network group because when we first announced the uh the network, we were not sure whether we will engage with so many people or not because what we were doing uh was not something extremely new. But at the end, we got more than 200 applications for the stakeholder network. Then it was a bit tough for us to review each application, try to decide which organization or which individual is uh really can bring uh innovation and perspective for the future of the stakeholder network. Then at the end, we kick it off a couple of months ago with 30 different organizations in our region, and it's also really great to see a couple of them here in Rome for the flagship event. So we had a chance to meet, catch up, and talk about the potential synergies between countries in our region that we may create in the long run. So I'm really proud of it.

SPEAKER_02 13:11

Um I would say um the agri voice series that we had that was really a good one because we had quite a number of people joining to participate in the consultation and the dialogue, and it's just a reflection of how much the youth want to get involved in that, and why this is not really directly in the global youth action plan, it is also what would lead to a second priority, which is the inclusion of youth. And this is really nice to have more youth coming together. Another one we did was a survey we had, and we got about 700 responses from people, and this is more like a lot of people want to get involved, and yeah, this is more like a push for us that we are getting somewhere with our global youth action plan, and probably next year we're going to like put all of these responses into action and implementation.

SPEAKER_03 14:17

Perfect. And talking about people getting involved, right? So, what's the best way for young people and organizations to connect and support the youth policy board? How they can do that? That was the best way to approach it.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

Yeah, I think the first one is um indirectly getting involved with the youth policy board because I feel like we are representative of the youth, and which means we can't proceed with anything without getting like feedback from them. So their feedback really matters a lot when we have like youth assembly consultation. We want them to actively join in all of these sessions and respond and then give their feedback about the challenges they are facing in each of their community. I feel like that is the first step in getting involved with the youth policy board. And then the second one is there's a lot of programs under the youth assembly, like the youth representative program, which they can apply for and get in into. I think that is another way for them to get involved. And then um, what else do we have? We have the national chapters also, which is like each region and each country. This is a way for them to like get involved. And most especially, we want collaboration and partnership when we have like um events or implementation program in each of the regions. We want them to bring in their skills they have to support our program because we need their support. We can't do it alone. The new policy board is just made up of like four or five people from the African region, with way over 50 countries in Africa. So we need more people to support our implementation program and our policy priority.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

I believe the importance of the intergenerational dialogue because most of the time we, as the youth, complaining about the older generation, and it's the same for the older generations, they are complaining about the upcoming ones. I think that the number one thing that we can do is creating this room where we can invite both the young people and the older generations to think together. Um, I don't think that's it's wise to use youth just to get their ideas. It's also highlighted during the flagship a couple of times, it's tokenism. It's not that the elder generations are designing the future on behalf of the youth. It's like they are co-designing the future together because we have, especially on the agriculture-related issues, we have many things to learn from the older generations, not to repeat their mistakes, also to learn their best practices. But also we can bring many innovative ideas, the tactical, the just digitalization-related inspirational things to be implemented on the agriculture to the older generation. So once we are able to create the synergy, this intergenerational dialogue, I think it will be much more easier for us to tackle with the future of food systems.

SPEAKER_03 17:23

I have to agree with you. I think uh intergenerational dialogue and being able to learn one from another, no? And I think uh we cannot achieve anything if we don't all come together. I think that's the only way that we can actually make real and drive real change in agri-food systems. Sara, anything to add on this?

SPEAKER_00 17:46

I think they were great words uh that my two speakers before already mentioned. Um, I think for me it's also like try to apply for the youth policy board. It's a it's a great initiative, it's a great chance. Um, I really encourage everyone who wants to get involved in or also understand UN processes, like how that do they work? I think that was also a huge driver for me to uh to enter the youth policy board to just understand how decisions are made, understand how the space is designed, and also understand where the youth can actually come in and drive change or uh bring in different voices. So I think that's a great chance already to get involved in the youth policy board. And I also encourage again the national chapters. I think they play a very big role in like implementing change on the on the local scale or in the national scale. And I think we're seeing this growing network of national chapters, and I think they have a huge um chance to really bring change on the local scale, and also in our region, in the Europe and Central Asia region, we are really trying to collaborate with also with the national chapters to see synergies and to yeah, also bring in topics that are identified on the national level to bring them again to the youth policy board.