FIRST Lady Arya Ali attended the One Young World 2022 Summit, this time held in Manchester, United Kingdom, where more than 2,000 ambitious young leaders from around the world are gathered to explore how the future of the world would be shaped from their specific areas of advocacy.

The message from the First Lady was to ignore the noise. “The truth is, once you are doing work, and good work, there will always be noise,” Mrs Ali recounted. “The naysayers and critics will always have criticisms, and not necessarily constructive ones, about our work. But if we want to achieve our objectives and create real impact, we must find a way to filter the noise,” she continued.

The First Lady has been, at home, a champion for young people, including young women and girls through her national initiative to end period poverty. Recognising the disparity of health experiences between women and girls in the coastland and the hinterland areas, the First Lady has done something miraculous by transforming what was initially a ceremonial office to one that is actively involved in facilitating transformational change and improving people’s lives through direct partnerships with government agencies, whether for health initiatives of environmental initiatives as the beautification projects.

These investments in Guyana’s young people will bear fruit in the decades to come by creating a level of responsible citizenship needed for Guyana’s social, economic and political transformation. President, Dr Irfaan Ali has strategically consolidated the ambitions of Guyanese youth through the creation of the President’s Youth Advisory Council.

There have been many variations of youth representative bodies in Guyana, but hardly any have survived over the years, leaving a noticeable gap for youth representation in the country for a demographic group that is regarded as the largest of our population. Young people are not a monolith and getting their representation right has been a herculean task.

Representation politics has made it almost impossible to ensure that young people are 100 per cent reflected in special interest representative bodies. This is especially true for a multicultural, multi-ethnic society such as Guyana where young people are spread across 83,000 square miles of hinterland and coastland, and where the inaccessible terrain and the digital divide concomitantly make representation difficult.

The bar on achieving peak representation in previously established youth-led initiatives had been set so unrealistically high that those bodies lost legitimacy before they even left the gate. It is easy to imagine, with youth not being a monolith, that an overwhelming amount of time would be spent on ironing out the appearance of the body, rather than focusing on actionable programmes. Resources were the other issue. With funding provided through the National Assembly in Budget 2022, the body’s programmes and spending are open to scrutiny by the nation’s elected representatives.

Guyana has longed for an institutionalised youth representative body. In his own words, the President, during the launch of the youth advisory council, plugged the need for institutions, mechanisms and systems which support the holistic development of people and country. Over the years, civil society organisations have largely operated through external funding sources.

While these have been important for bridging large social gaps, these local organisations are sometimes left bare and withered as those external funding sources dry up, and the very communities where the interventions were implemented sometimes revert to pre-intervention cultures because of lacking sustainability and succession planning.

Representative politics has been quite a difficult undertaking because it is hardly possible to ensure every group is represented in governance. But the core mandate of young people’s well-being is what also matters in this intervention. For the first time in Guyana’s history, there is synergy between the Executive and the Legislature that a youth representative body for Guyana is necessary and this is what has been achieved.