A Youth Activist on the Road Out

By Emily Freeburg, WireTap. Posted July 19, 2004.

At the age of 17, Bremley Lyngdoh, a native of India, attended the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It was 1992 and he and other youth participants noticed a need for youth voices in international decision-making. Since then he has spoken about the importance of youth participation all over the world, from the chambers of the UN General Assembly to the streets of India. In 1999 he co-founded the Global Youth Action Network (GYAN), an organization which now serves to connect thousands of youth organizations in over 200 countries and territories.

An activist who prefers to work from the inside, Bremley recently brought his expertise to the World Bank where, among other things, he looked at the role of young people in preserving the environment and doing away with poverty. This fall he will be leaving his current position as Program Manager at the Youth Employment Summit Campaign (YES) and heading to the London School of Economics to complete his PhD in Sustainable Development.

Although he's no longer technically a youth, Bremley carries the institutional memory of an international youth movement that, over the last ten years, has grown increasingly sophisticated, creative and powerful. WireTap caught up with him recently and invited him to reflect on an ever-evolving movement.

WT: The World Bank has a pretty bad reputation with many people, should we people have faith in the Bank?

I was always one of those young people in the streets demonstrating and doing direct action because I was frustrated and apathetic and I labeled politicians all the same breed. I've done that for a long time, but then I thought hey, what if I speak their language and go inside the system of the Bank or the UN and change them from within instead of shouting out in the streets protesting and getting arrested.

I think the Bank and the UN save a lot of money because once you become staff you stay until you are 60. I just hope that the leadership will change and the doors will open up to the younger crew to come in at a professional level that will be respected for the value they bring, not just as youth or activists, but also as professionals who can really contribute to achieving what needs to be done.

WT: Do you think the role of youth is recognized in the international community?

Oh yes, I can tell you for a fact that since the Earth Summit in Rio [in 1992] many doors have been opened, especially in the Commission on Sustainable Development process, which is the most participative process in the UN system where governments consult with young people as part of the nine major [civil society] groups.

Even in the Security Council after Sept. 11, the governments are talking about youth because they are linking youth apathy and youth unemployment to destruction. They say an idle mind is destructive, but I would say that an educated, idle mind is worse because then you can organize, you can plan and you can really do bad things if you think in a negative way. Youth unemployment could lead to a national disaster. If we don't engage young people and give them a dignified form of employment or livelihood so they can sustain the family they will surely rebel against the system.

In 2005 we have the first five-year check on achieving the Millennium Development Goals, eight goals set by 189 countries of world to achieve in 2015. So far the world is not on track to reaching these goals, how can young people make these goals a reality?

My dream is to connect what I call the "triple A," the activists, the artists and the academics. I think the activist are the people that are on the ground who could do the hardcore development work, we could call them sustainable development professionals. The artists come in as people who are established and who want to help, young celebrities with money like Bono for example, or Jewel who supported us to fund the GYAN office in 2000. The artists can sing, act or use the media, to attack the mainstream by channeling their energy towards a development issues like HIV/AIDS, debt relief or whatever is closest to them. The artists can work with the activists on the ground by supporting their projects with fundraising. The academics, like Jeffery Sachs or Joseph Stieglitz, who are established and known around the world, can give youth academic and technical support so they become legitimate. And the best students at the best universities to get their professors to focus on regional issues facing young people.

WT: There's a lot of buzz in the international community about "partnerships." What kind of youth partnerships do you see working?

Why not hire the youth themselves to take care of the problems that young people face in their country, instead of sending in consultants from other countries who don't have a real picture of that country or community?

Partnerships mean really trusting youth with real resources and projects and policies on the ground so youth can implement, design, monitor and evaluate the projects themselves. The trust has to be built to say, "hey, we're going to give you guys a million dollars and it will be your show, we will not tell you what to do." It is not like "here's the money and here's how we want you to do it, that's not really a partnership," that's a dictatorship.

Emily Freeburg, 23, is a freelance journalist in New York.

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