 Ayah Chebbi's online activism helped propel her to global fame. As the African Union's first ever special youth envoy, she travelled around the continent, listening and speaking to young Africans. On the international stage, she advocated for Africa's youth agenda to more than 160 global leaders. Well, I caught up with Chebbi recently and asked her what she's learned about young Africans and what this generation really wants. Being in Africa now is so exciting for me because all I see is progress, progress. Many of the demands of youth is around the delivery of services. That's why you need to have your voice heard at the African Union level. We are all of the whole generations and we're taking part of change and transformation. I always say we're the coolest and the better educated generation and the most innovative generation. And I think what is unique about us as African youth, because we reach a point in history right now, like the millennials, we are the youngest in history and in the world. We're 65% and a 30 as African youth and our population in Africa. So we have this demographic power that didn't exist before. So when young people take to the street, when no one listens, it's really power. It's in masses. Let's change things up. Even before joining the African Union, I traveled across 30 African countries at least, just you know, living with my comrades and to see that we have the same issues. We are products of the same regimes, the same systems, the same structures. And that gives us also the power when we come together, we can have those solutions to apply to many of our countries. So I think the Pan-African space for my generation right now is very unique compared to like the 60s and 50s because at the time they wanted to create nation states. For them, the achievement was independence. But for us, we want a borderless continent. We want a governance. We want, you know, to live on the internet, to innovate. We want e-commerce. We want to trade. We want to, we want different things, but it's very unique to our generation. Even though we are oppressed, you know, like the internet shutdown is really oppressing a lot of young people to innovate online. The police brutality when young people go out to the streets is oppressing young people from expressing themselves. A lot of young people today live on a daily basis feeling that I can die of COVID-19 or I can die of hunger or I can die on the Mediterranean. It's the same for me. I do not enjoy as a young person my basic human rights. And that could be from living in poverty, to not being able to express yourself, to your government not believing in you, not investing in you, to your start up dying, you know, after putting all your dreams on it after one year because no one supports you, to you as a young woman, you know, finding yourself double crime because you're young and you're female to people with disability to finding yourself in a refugee camp. So all these are forms of marginalization and layers of marginalization. But I think the bottom line of it is the perception of injustice, but it's not fair that we have the youngest continent in the world and we're run by old men. It's just not fair. So that perception that it's not fair that 70% of Africa is offline while the rest of the world is enjoying their access to internet. It's not fair that we don't contribute to climate change and we're the most impacted for it. So those perception of injustice for me is what makes young people feel so marginalized and it makes them feel, OK, then I belong to a violent group or I belong to extremist group or I can find an alternative space of belonging because my government, my state, my community doesn't value me. Basically, it goes down to am I valued as a young person? No, we still live in a continent that doesn't care about its youthful population, even though in speeches and in discourses and it's all about demographic dividends. But concretely, you know, there is no value and justice in what this generation really deserves. I was fascinated how in the 50s and 60s they could mobilize across borders and in one year in 1960, 10 countries got independence and they had no Facebook, no WhatsApp, no any tools to do that. And I'm like, this is African solidarity. This is feeling that your liberation is my liberation, that if Tunisia doesn't get independence, I'm not I'm not liberated in Ghana, that if Zimbabwe doesn't get independent, I'm not liberated in Tanzania. They were talking about one language. They were talking about one continent. They were talking about fighting imperialism, fighting colonization. Yes, the Pan-Africanism had a different meaning in the 1650s. It had different meaning in the fight against apartheid. It had different meaning for my, you know, mothers and fathers and grandfathers. It has different meaning for us. So it is for my generation to redefine it and it is for other generations to accept that we have a different vision because we are facing different challenges. We can't come to 21st century, you know, solutions and challenges with 20th century tools. It cannot, it just will not work. So when I started mobilizing Pan-Africanism in 2011, actually quite after Tunisia's revolution and seeing that we inspired Senegal, Yonahmar movement, we inspired Balais citoyen in Burkina. We inspired the whole continent to rise up. We inspired fees must fall to go on the street. And to me, that was, for me, an opportunity. How can we take that moment and momentum now to build a Pan-African spirit, to build a Pan-African movement? And I'm happy to see the past decade, this is growing, standing in solidarity with, and SARS, standing with solidarity with Ugandan youth, standing with solidarity with different young people, whether it's an election time, whether when it's social movement going on the streets, it's fascinating. But I think what we need to do now is to organize. Now we have the momentum, we have the spirit. We understand the struggle. We understand we come from one history and we're going to one destiny. But I think organizing now what will take the continent to the next level. Because then the leaders will realize that you cannot go away by doing what you do in your country. Because other young people in other countries will call you white and will stand up for those young people. So I hope we can reach that level of organizing.