 on promoting the role of youth in political and democratic spaces. So this event is also organized in support of the Summit for Democracy Youth cohort. And today we have quite an interesting panel. We have one which focuses on youth and political participation, and the other one on youth and on intellectual integrity. We're also lucky to have a great variety of speakers from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa who will speak about the country's commitments and also the work that they currently do on youth. And we also have representatives from the civil society who provide their perspective inputs on the discussion. So before I hand over to Tom Miller to do the introduction, I also just want to add a couple of things that we do have simultaneous translation to Spanish. I will also kindly ask all the panelists to stick to their allotted time of seven minutes so we have time for discussions. And also if you do have questions during the panel, you can post them on the Q&A and the moderators will try to follow up on them after the presentation. So with this, handing over the word to Tom Miller to do the introduction. Thank you. Thanks Nikolai. I hope you can hear me properly. I was speaking yesterday at an event and people were too polite to tell me they couldn't hear me for the first three minutes. But, well, welcome to this webinar on promoting the role of youth in political and democratic space. And my thanks to international ideas, hosts and co-organizers with us on this event. And with the, of course, youth cohort and civic and political engagement. It's great to see so many youthful faces. I am literally a grey man in a grey suit, so I will be brief. You have a packed agenda, as Nikolai said, with some great panelists. And I'm sure there'll be a healthy discussion with the audience. I just wanted to preface the brief points to say that, of course, to underline the fact that youth empowerment and engagement is a priority for the European Union and indeed personally for our commissioner. As you know, we've launched our youth action plan this year. We, of course, we are co-leads of the youth cohorts and we will be launching our youth and women in democracy initiative very shortly under our programming under the Global Europe Program. I just want to make three short points, really, and I'll certainly be under seven minutes. But just first, just in case you doubt the importance of youth in terms of political engagement, think briefly about the US midterms. You've had one of the highest youth turnouts in decades. Without that turnout, Republicans might well have taken the Senate and certainly would have had a bigger majority in the House. And despite many complaints of obstacles to voting for many youth in many states, and I know that's a problem globally. But red or blue, higher turnout means more democracy. It means better representation and that's to be welcomed. So three points. First of all, on the summit for democracy process. I mean, I think the summit's original in two ways. We're used to these kind of summits on a regular basis and sometimes you can be a bit cynical about them. But the summit, you've got the free and individual choice by participating states to make commitments to improve and promote democracy. And secondly, working towards that, you've got what they call the democracy cohorts, there are 18 of them are helping to design and implement these commitments in different areas. The innovative aspect of these democracy cohorts is to make is making governments and institutions work together with civil society and NGOs. And I said, innovative, well, is that innovative? It's difficult. It's not always done. It's often paid lip service to and I think in this case, it's really being done. And this type of alliance makes a lot of sense to effectively promote democracy. We need these two legs, these two legs working in tandem to move forward. Secondly, the youth participation cohort itself. We are lucky to have over 40 entities working with the co-leadership. And that reflects I think a great diversity on the government and institutional side we have Nepal. We have Ghana. We have asked the European Commission on the civil society side. And we have the European partnership for democracy PD. We have African activists. We have a European democracy youth network. And across all the membership, we also have a great geographic diversity. And these 40 or so organizations represent international organizations, grassroots groups, and of course, youth groups themselves. In terms of a primary goal, I think it's not about making sure that youth have a table of their own, but rather making sure that youth are represented at every table. And that should go for the summit itself. But of course, every aspect of our governance. The third and final point I just wanted to make is about the commitments themselves. Why are we having this cohort? Well, look, I mean, communications, outreach, listening, learning, lesson learning will be key. But the cohort has to be much more than that. It's first of all about doing something together and getting real change. And I think this is what's happening here. The young people as part of the group, youth led organizations, democracy support organizations have jointly devised a menu of possible commitments, possible commitments. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of commitments that everyone has to be signed up to. It's possibilities where each participating state can according to its own context, its own needs, pick a few areas or topics, the most practical ones, the most doable ones to help improve youth participation in their democracies. Now that this menu is in the process of being developed, we have to think about advertising it. And I think today's meeting is a great opportunity to do that. Advertising is not enough that you need to advocate. It's not just awareness we're trying to build, it's support. We should encourage participating states to have a close look at these, you know, preferred or menu of commitments, the exemplary commitments, if you like, and sign up to them and then really implement them. And I think civil society organizations and youth groups and so on are making their expertise and networks available to help participating states select, adopt and implement these commitments. I mean, going forward, I think that when we try and measure our success, it's that states feel an irresistible urge if you like to make and deliver on these commitments, putting young people firmly at the center of their democracies, devising and advocating for concrete, measurable commitments is critical work. We need to build momentum on this. And don't forget that in the summit itself, this is not a youth summit. This is a summit for democracy. There's going to be other cohorts who as I say other cohorts are available. There's going to be a lot of clamor, a lot of noise. The youth one needs to needs to be energetic and innovative in the way that only youth can be making sure that the what we are advocating for what we're asking for is rising above that hubbub. So look, having said that I'll hand back to Nikolai and I think you're going into the first panel and best of luck with your discussions. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Tom, for your inspiring introduction. And I think with that, I'm going to hand over to an Simon budget to lead the first panel. Thank you. So, thank you very much, Thomas. Thank you idea for receiving us. Thank you, Nikolai. So welcome everyone welcome to this discussion about youth participation in democratic processes. It will be the first panel. The speakers introduced me and then our speakers, and then introduce a bit the context before letting them present. So what they have to say. So, my name is and Simon budget, I am program coordinator at the European partnership for democracy, and I coordinate our youth oriented program which is named the youth participation in public affairs. As you just mentioned, Thomas EPD is co leader of the youth civic engagement and civic and political engagement cohort with Ghana that will have, we have a representative of. Two other panelists will be Cathy, Cathy, Eddie. She's the chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education in Ghana, the NCCC. She will talk about the commitments Ghana took for youth participation in the country. And the second one will be Mrs. Katarina Jacob Shekova. She's analyst for EU policies, the government office of the Slovak Republic. She will talk about the Slovakian engagement and commitments towards democracy. And fortunately, we had a third panelist which will be unavailable for her reason, which is regrettable. Mr. Samson, it's all from the Africa finally won't be won't be joining us. And so know that we will have those two ladies speaking right after me. So to expose a bit the context. The first summit for democracy held last year in December 2021 brought together leaders from government civil society and the private sector to set on affirmative agenda for democratic renewal between the first and the second summit, which will happen probably next March, but we don't have the final date yet. A year of action was initiated. See this year of action is an opportunity for governments to begin to implement their commitments commitments to democracy they took at the end of the previous summit. And with the help of civil society and democracy support organizations. So young people, women leaders and other active groups CSL's democracy support organizations can also play a role in advocating for more ambitious and more accurate commitments by participating states. Open up the possibility for the EU abroad as well as at home with the support from the team Europe democracy to partner with global youth countries with the current purpose of promoting democratic values. So, just to recall the commitments the relevant commitments took taken by Ghana and Slovakia so Ghana committed to work with the electoral commission to ensure the full legitimacy of elections, enhance the transparency and accountability of the governments and to fight corruption through measures such as establishment of the office of special prosecutor. Slovakia has committed to support various programs, including the CRV, which encourages the participation of youth and women in Europe's democracy democratic life, as well as facilitating and enhancing political and civic participation of women, youth and other marginalized group in the EU partner countries. Okay, so this, this panel will look to discuss the importance of youth participation in democratic processes and identify good practices and lesson learned with regards to how the commitments were identified, what strategies what are the best practices, so, and many other questions so I will let now our panelists present their speech and feel free, all of you, to participate by sending us your questions in the chat box. We will share afterwards certainly our contacts, and if you want to know more go deeper into what has been said, please contact us. So now I give the floor to Mrs. Catherine Adi. Thank you very much for that introduction. I'm having some internet challenges so I might go off and on please forgive me in advance. Let's talk about our Ghana experience with youth participation. First of all, I'd like to thank the organizers for putting this together. It's not a short notice and thank all the participants for making the time to be here. Let's talk about youth participation in politics. In Ghana, there's a long history of it, right from our post-independence period, all the political struggle has been led by very young people. In post-colonial period, there were several groups and a lot of political instability. When General Insou became the longest-serving head of state, this is his first school, he was very 30, he was about 31 or 32. And so were other people around him, very, very young, relatively young people if you think about political leadership. And by the time he was 35, he was in government for a very long time. So he came into government as a young person. And when Ghana made the push to go back to a republic in the early 90s, when the political parties started reforming, regrouping, because they had been banned for over 20 years, when they started regrouping, then there again, young people were at the forefront of all of this, particularly young people in school, student representatives, what they call the SRCs here, which are student representative councils, which are the political leadership of the universities and even high schools. And so because of the way we came into the first republic in the early 90s and the fact that a lot of the activism was done by young people, we had a situation where there was a lot of migration from students who were student leaders, transitioning into politics and political parties, why the parties formed. And because of that, over time, there's always this tradition of young people in university who are active in student politics, transitioning into national politics, going streets to be representatives as soon as they are out of school. So there's a very long tradition of that. So to that extent, already in terms of the political culture, there's a lot of youth participation. As I mentioned in Brussels a couple of weeks ago, a big part of youth participation in Ghana is based on the fact that the youth wings of the political parties are actually the drivers of the political party. In terms of the leaders of the party, you may not see too much youth representation. And so once a party wins power and goes into government, then you see a disproportionate number of young people in leadership positions. But nonetheless, the political party wings drive the machine of the political party. And once the women come, they're coming to power, there's a great push to ensure that even though young people will not be the majority of the people in government, there's a fairly good representation. That's how the culture has been. So young people, as long as they're in the university system, tend to have access to political participation in leadership because they come through the system into the political parties and they get into forefront of politics. Now, young people who are out of, who are not in the tertiary school, in the tertiary schools, will be the ones who will be really disadvantaged in the system that we're running because there is no clear, there's no clear path for them, except that, again, in many communities, youth groups are very active youth groups that, they group around issues. So for instance, they group around issues like community policing, working together with law enforcement. So where you have young people who have organized themselves into groups in communities, you find out that, again, they are able to transition because as soon as the political parties see organized groups, particularly young groups, they reach out to them and exert influence and try and absorb them into their ranks because they take the politics very seriously. So, but what that means is that in all of them, there's a wide swath of young people who, not by design, but just by the way things are, tend to be excluded from access, you know, because we practice a multi-party democracy. So the political parties are key drivers of our democracy and democratic process. And so once younger people are not plugged into the political parties, then it's not clear how they become politically active. Recently, that has changed because, of course, of social media, where young people are able to organize and have their voice heard and express their political opinion and are able to participate by being active on social media and pushing for things to be done through a shared impact of the voice and impact of social media. So if I were to talk of any gaps, I would say that it would be young people who are not plugged into the traditional ways that young people used to get into the political space. And so everything that we do must focus on, you know, how to close that gap. One of the problems we have with the political parties here in Uganda is that even though they are public institutions over the years, over time, they've ended up running themselves like private clubs in a way. And so the internal, the required democratic rigor for their internal administration may be found wanting within the political parties themselves. And so that also becomes a hindrance for easy access for young people to get into those parties. So if we are going to look at this thing in Ghana, we're going to look at how to bridge this gap. These are the areas that I will focus on. I will focus on young people who don't have a clear and direct part in the political system. And this is the majority of young people, actually, because not everybody can be a student representative. And not everybody goes into the student representative castles, their transition into government. So in terms of access, direct access, I would want to create a situation where young people have other parts into the political system beyond just the student representative castles. That there are opportunities for them to become politically active, to organize themselves and develop a voice that will then have to be taken into consideration in decision making, even if they are not necessarily active in the political parties. There must be a way for them to be able to express themselves and have their voices and their opinions included in the policymaking process. So that would be the first thing. The other thing being that working with the political parties themselves to improve their internal democracy, thereby opening up and creating avenues and access for different types of young people to come on board as the lead politician. I don't know if I've covered all of it. Maybe I would stop now. I don't know if this was my understanding of the brief. I don't know if I've actually captured it. Somebody should tell me if I haven't, if there's anything else I need to touch on. But this is my understanding of the brief. And so maybe if there are no questions right now, I'd like to stop here and give opportunities for someone else to speak and then come back to questions. Or I'm willing and open to questions right now if possible as well. Thank you, Kathleen. Okay, we can leave it for the questions later. And probably there will be some more. Some more interest about it. So please, if you're interested, leave your questions in the chat or in the Q&A. Now, I will give the floor to Katarina. Thank you very much and hello everyone. Also, many thanks to the organizers for organizing this important panel on youth participation in democratic processes. As I think it's a very important topic. And maybe I will just actually start with just providing a few reasons why I think it's so important to talk about youth and to include youth in democratic processes. So first of all, it's because it's the essence of democracy, simple as that. Second of all, if we want to make sure that the youth is in public events and global challenges, we need to make sure once they become adults, we need to actually make sure that they start being involved in decision making processes already at a younger age. Third reason would be simply preventative measures. If we don't include the youth in democratic processes, then simply someone else will. And that would be a shame. And fourth reason is actually, I think Kathleen gave a very good example because also from my experience it seems that the youth has a lot of energy and enthusiasm as Kathleen was saying, there are the ones, there are the drivers behind the political party. And I think combination of youth with, you know, older generations and experts and with adults is great because they have the experience and the youth has still the drive enthusiasm and the energy to change things. So I think it's important and this is also what Thomas Miller said to make sure that youth should be simply represented at every single table, whatever, or wherever that is. In terms of what Slovakia is doing, I wanted to talk about one specific initiative, which is called participatory budgeting in schools. So going back to involving the youth at each table, they should be also involved at school tables, let's say, and what is this participatory budgeting. So basically, school gets a budget for different projects and students are involved right away from the very beginning in the process of how this budget will be divided, which projects will be implemented. And this can be, for instance, improving Wi-Fi or internet connection at school or beautification of classrooms or trash, separation of trash. And it's very important that students and the youth is involved from the very beginning of this process. So they are the ones who have to think about the project, then select the ones that for them are the best, then actually implement them and also decide how the budget will be divided and then they see the results. So they're directly involved in making their school a better place. And this is a really good step, how to make them later on involved in being involved in what's happening in their city. So outside of the walls of the school and then what's happening in their country and for them it will come very naturally because they've already experienced it in schools. So in terms of Slovakia, we have right now around 100 high schools who are participating in this project and of course there is a whole methodology of how this is being implemented. So you have a special workshops for teachers and for school coordinators who first need to understand how this participatory budget thing works. Then you have a special board game for students that also explains in a learning way how this whole dividing of budget works and what are the potential ideas for projects and how they should be evaluated with the criteria for evaluation, etc. But it seems to be working and it seems to be getting more and more popular in Slovakia and it's just a very simple way how to make them a bit more interested and also to give them a chance to show and present their ideas. So there should be this double ownership, let's say. And so it has many benefits. First of all, it supports the whole democratic establishment of schools and it also enhances community spirit, it improves and strengthens critical thinking among students and it raises their awareness about what's happening around them. And it also makes them mingle so between different age groups they get to interact maybe with classmates from different classrooms, etc. So it's very inclusive and interactive. I now would probably end at here, but I just wanted to kind of talk about this one specific initiative as it seems like a good concrete example of what we can do to make sure that the youth is involved already at our age stage. And I mean, well, children and like young students, they spend most of the time during this, during this age at school, so it makes sense that we start with schools and then we do something in this environment. Thank you. Thank you very much, Katharina. Okay. So I will just summarize a bit and thank you for both of your interventions. So thank you, Kathleen. Thank you. Your speech was very informative. It is really great to hear it's great and refreshing somehow to hear this enthusiasm and this dynamic to feel this dynamic in your new speech and to hear about this will to include you to see that there are there is quite some youth responsive to it. All these youth group who really believe in democracy and we're so willing to engage themselves to know more to be more educated to to be formed. It's great to see the efforts made to reach out to educate them and help them concretely. Those are really great opportunities. So if some of you are interested in knowing more about those projects, we will share the contact of Kathleen in the chat. So thank you very much, Katharina for your for your intervention. It's, it's good also to see in Slovakia it is well to engage youth even at a, at a younger age, because we are we have a tendency to focus your youth like we think it's 18 or 230. Yeah, it is really important to include them already when they are younger it is a way to to ensure the future of democracy and also their stability. And, and yes, here I can see that politics is seen as something well generally quite hard to to understand that it is something for older people are intellectual people. But there are some smaller steps like some actions are accessible to younger to younger generations and it's great for your intervention we can see it. They, these kind of civic engagement action they give taste and ideas for engagement and show that the voice of the youth is more and more heard. Yes, it's real. And it's great to see the awareness are raising around it. So do we have questions in the chat, but not yet. I have some others prepared. Thank you to Kathy and Katarina. How following you can countries use the summit for democracy process to foster collaboration on democracy internationally do you have some ideas about how the summit could process. I can jump in. That's okay. So in case of Slovakia Slovakia is involved in three cohorts. One of them is focuses on media freedom. The second one is fight against corruption. And the third one is strengthening civic society, which I mean, to some extent involves the dimension of the youth as well. And what I think and it is a great advantage of the summit or the benefit of this is that it allows you to exchange your know how an experience with other countries were also participating in those cohorts. And then you can get inspiration best practices, and also because you have to make those commitments that we made at the beginning now is the year of action, of course. You also feel the commitment to actually implement it. And I think during the next summit. There should be some sort of a conclusion and the results of what what what countries actually managed to accomplish during this year of action. So, definitely, to just like summarize it a bit the two main and that advantages are, it makes you commit, and it allows you to exchange know how with other countries who might be more experienced in the specific area that you're dealing with. Thank you. Do you have an idea do you want to answer that one. No, I lost it for a minute. Okay, so we have two questions in the chat box for you. Okay, I see it in the chat. We have a lot of practices to engage adults, teachers and parents. Okay. Well, well, I mean, for me. I don't know, maybe we are not really at that point where we are because the, the, we've been, we've been practicing democracy for tomorrow next year will be the fourth Republic is about 30 years now. A fairly good democratic culture, and then up for elections. Typically election results 70% plus. And people are generally speaking very, very, very engaged and enthusiastic about the politics is that over the last couple of months because of, of economic action, and some sorts of political. I don't know if I should use the word craziness, but some sort of political problems or whatever you call it. So there's a bit of disillusionment and this is one of the things that the one reasons why we really need to make an effort to engage young people in particular, because for us. We have a huge bulge about 70% of the population population is 35 and that's something like that. And so really that's what our concentration is. And these are people that to very strong traditional cultures here. The thing about the end so far so it's easy in the past it was easier to manage people in the context of their preferred traditional. political culture, or their political party, there are two strong parties here. But there are reasons why we have to focus on young people really hard is the fact that they don't have the historical baggage that pushes them to be strongly aligned with one political party or the other. And so these are people whose minds are open to all sorts of things, including non democratic, non democratic options of seeing the world. And so for us, parents and teachers specifically also because we don't know what we do when we do civic education and democratic and democracy education in this at a school level. It is through our commission which is not. So it's not part of the school curriculum is the commission coming into to do the civic education and democracy education in the schools. So it's a kind of different structure. We target the adult population very well they're very engaged reactive. We must target young people better. We must, we must, we must work for the entrenchment of a democratic culture where people see democracy as what the path that they need to take and the path that gives the best outcomes. Even if you have to have all these difficulties along the way. And so, and so, you know, we, so we don't have specific programs targeting things like parents. In fact, here in Ghana, it's easier to target the adult education adult population through their religious activities. So we meet people in their churches, we meet people in their mosques, and that will include parents and teachers and, and that for us is a more effective way of engaging, engaging the adult population. We also meet people in their associations, their trade association. So you may have a hairdresser's association. You may have tomato queens association or young boys or young sellers association. And so we tend to target people in those ways rather than the broader strokes of these are for parents and these are for teachers. It's kind of a different, a different way of doing it here. But we definitely have a greater focus on the younger population. Great. Thank you Gatlin. Very instructive. I will continue fast so that we can answer the many questions that arise in the middle. So there is one first question for Katarina. Question one. I think the main challenge is to make this project inclusive, to have everyone in the room participating, example given girls. So, Katarina, can you answer? Yes, I'm here, sorry I had my technical issues, can you hear me? Yes, yes, I can. The others too, I think. Can you hear me? Yes, yes, I do. Hello. Oh, good. So, regarding things, I hope you can hear me now anyway. It's really important to spread out the word and to make sure that you participate with students, that you explain them how this participatory budgeting works. And that's why this board game was very useful because it's a method of how in a way easy, kind of playful way you get to teach anyone the basic rules behind the participatory budgeting. So it doesn't sound so strict. So it doesn't sound too strict or too complicated. And I think there was also another question, so I'm just going to quickly reply because I'm not sure what's happening with the connection. But there was a question about how to involve parents and adults. I think what we've experienced is that often what children and young students learn at school, for example, the reasons why you should separate the trash and then they already see the benefits of it. They can also pass on this message to their parents and actually be, they can be the one explaining them why it is so important and kind of insist on them doing the same thing. So it works almost the opposite way that it's not parents teaching children but vice versa. And because children and the youth really like believe in the results and they actually saw the results of this, they can be a little more assertive and also convincing parents or grandparents to start implementing those methods. Thank you very much. Okay, and so both of them. Perfect. I will ask the next one to both of you but first maybe, Kathleen. What, what do you feel would be the top three commitments governments could make through the summit for democracy process to include youth in democracy. Can I respond to this. Yes. Okay. Well, I think right from Brazos I stated that the commitments have to be realistic commitments that government commits to actually execute. And I think that should be the key thing because one of the lessons I've learned over the years is that the best way to get one of the best ways to get things moving is to work in collaboration with those who would do the actual movie. Yeah, I'm just, I don't know what the question is right now so can you repeat the question. What do you. Sorry, I was off for a minute. I'm sorry I was in the middle of saying something I don't know if you could hear me or not. Okay. Catherine, you can finish. Yes, it's okay. No no no it's okay because I was saying that I did not hear the question so please go ahead and I'll jump in one day. The next day after the next. Okay, so. Catherine, can you hear us. Is the sound issue come on to everyone. Can you give us the chat. Okay, should I respond to the specific issues and other issues as well. Yes, if you want you can. Yes, we can go to that one. So there's a question here about resistance against young people going directly into political parties on the university and to say that of course there is resistance. There is resistance, but because the, because young people face such an important role for the political parties in terms of being campaign and going out camp as things we're investing their time having the energy and all of that. They are able to create some spaces for themselves and even the parties make commitments in terms of maybe the number of people to put in position the number of younger people that will push in position. During the election cycle they make those sorts of commitments to motivate the youth wings who are really hard to win an election. So there is resistance, of course, but the resistance does not. That don't mean that young people do not get to you. You don't get to have a voice at all within the party. So there's that there was a. I don't know which other questions. Okay, so addressing representation within the youth groups. Okay, so for us for permission. We have when we do engagement. It's not just for young people, we normally just have to get young people, women, people with disability. We normally just have to get those groups in all the community engagements and school based engagements we have because it's something we recognize. If we don't, if we don't break it down that way, we'll probably miss a large number of people. There are communities that you go to. And then when you call everybody for a town hall meeting, the men come and the women don't come. And then when you ask them, they're not going to say, oh, we're not allowed to attend or just say, oh, I was busy doing this all that. But if you understand the culture of the people, you will know that maybe it's a culture where men and women don't have issues in the same month. So we would always have separate events for women alone. And also people minority groups try to stay very conscious of that in our words. Of course, we may not capture everybody 100%, but it's definitely in every project that we have, we have the lines for vulnerable groups, for minorities, for people with disabilities. And for us, a minority in the community to be, you know, a language minority people, a small group of people who just speak a different language that few other people understand. And not because they are being intentionally excluded or anything, it's just that nobody is able to, nobody outside the group is able to do the communication. And so we are very, very conscious of that as for when we do the work. And indeed, the commission has staff in every district in the country, and there are districts that have people speaking multiple languages. What we try to ensure is that in every district office, we have somebody who speaks the local language. First of all, in our district offices, we don't do any public education in English. It's mostly in the local languages. And when we are hiring, we look out for people who speak the languages that are least spoken so that we will be able to also get education in their communities. So we try to do those, those needs to capture all those people into the public education that we have. Yeah, the fourth idea, the electoral cycle, I think it's also very problematic as well. And that's why for us, we are trying to build a consensus around whatever commitments we choose to make. And consensus means dealing with the party in government, the party in opposition, dealing with our normal stakeholders, like the traditional rulers, the religious rulers and all religious leaders and all of those things. So we ensure that whatever commitments that we make, you know, sort of have acceptors across board, it makes things easier when you put in the work to build a coalition around, around a commitment. So that no matter what, wherever you find yourself in the political cycle, you'll find people who remember that we're part of the committee process. I think that that will respond to that. It's important to be inclusive in identifying what commitments are and to ensure that a lot of the key stakeholders within the country are comfortable with the commitments that you make. So that you don't have a government in that thing, I was not here when you made this commitment. So you can actually hold a leadership to account on the commitments that you make at all times. And it's interesting about the participatory budgeting in Slovakia. We have some projects like that. In our commission, we have a project that is in which is school based policy making process where we have the students identified a problem in the community and go through the policy making steps to come up with a solution for that problem. So policy making, the pre policy making data collection analysis of information, collecting views and all of that finding expert opinion, looking at how others looking at case studies and how others have solved that particular problem. And then, at the end of the day, there's a competition where these these schools compete to identify who, who has the most. Who's whose whose whose case is more is most compelling and who has come up with the best result. And so through that, we are able to have a sense of how a government should run and how a local government should run because this is the project that just exists. So that's project because then we have a social auditing program where communities come together. We facilitate a platform for communities to come together with their duty various and identify the most pressing need out of all the pressing needs that they have. And then work in a very systematic way to ensure that that need is met. And through that process we've had a few really great access stories where. Communities have even put up maybe a classroom block, or maybe a nursery school, or something like that, or solve a particular problem, maybe a water water access water problem or something like that in their community. So it's great to know that school based programs actually really we have community based programs, actually very important because it brings the whole democratic practice and governance good governance practices to life. You know, for the for the people who participate. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. It was very informative and complete. Thank you for reacting to all those questions. Thank you Catherine as well. Sorry for all the sound issue. I hope. And I think we got the most of it we haven't made we heard, we heard the most important things. So thank you very much to our panelists. This is the end of this first panel discussion. It was great and very informative to and good. We needed to to to see the here that the youth voice was being is being heard to see that we want to use our their creativity our creativity or innovation to be inclusive and ensure the future and stability of democracy. So, and now for the second part of this panel, I get the floor, I mean, Nikolai to introduce me just say just like a few words in the end because I had some technical difficulties I just wanted to thank you so much. And maybe just like the last remark about the partisan partisan budgeting. It also teaches, you know, children to maybe appreciate things a bit more for instance when they're involved in beautification project of their school, they, the chances of them then damaging something on purpose are much lower because I mean they were involved in the process and in the project of implementing a beautification of making it nice so because they're involved in the process they tend to appreciate than those things more and and care. So maybe that's just like a final final remark but I don't want to keep you longer so thank you so much for inviting me sorry for the technical difficulties I don't know what happened there. But I hope you it was at least to some extent, useful for you and inspiring. Bye bye. Okay, thank you very much. And Simone, Kathy and Catherine for your, your presentations and for your, your very interesting discussions. I think we'll just move straight over to the second panel. Ricardo, I will let you take the floor. Thank you. Ricardo, we can't hear you. Radio check 123. Perfect. Go ahead. Works. Yeah. Okay. Sorry for wasting time precious time I think that as we, as I see in the previous panels a lot of discussion and and questions and answers so I'm just going to cut my introduction to the minimum. Ricardo Kelly at the ES, the election observation and democracy division. And I had the honor to host four different speakers, starting with Ambassador Pekka hook to from Finland to Mrs. Mariela Castro Avila from Costa Rica. And Nevada, give me rare from Nepal. And Mrs Beatriz and made a sub from DRI. So I suggest that I open the floor immediately to the first speaker. I think that's just to resume to sum up what the specific focus of this panel is is empowering participation or youth in the digital sphere, and I will add, because I think it's clear that youth is already very much in engaged in digital sphere but I would I would add to this participation to eject the meaningful participation and a positive participation and that all link to preserving the electoral integrity of versus instances of disinformation and misinformation. Anyway, without any more comments from me, I will just pass the floor to Ambassador hook up. Please Ambassador. Yes, thank you very much. I hope everybody can hear the voice from far away north. Thank you very much for organizing and thank you very much for inviting a gray another gray puncher to this panel. Finland participated in the first summit and we are now busy busy preparing with partners for the next summit taking place in the first part of next year. I don't know when, but we will be there. The implementation of the commitments made for the year of action are ongoing together with our key stakeholders. We are active in three cohorts and keep an eye on couple of others, including this one for youth. We reported on our progress just two weeks ago to the Americans to State Department and will be sharing the information with the idea any day from now. First, a couple of words from the domestic front. I don't want to sound pompous, but I think I can say that the tradition of democracy in Finland is strong. Integrity of the elections and the election system are perceived so it. However, democracy can never be ready. Economic downturns, complex global challenges to democracy, home and abroad and the current unstable international situation such as to the urgency and importance of defending well function in democratic system at both national and international level. Finland conducted a national process, a very consultative national process to update the democracy. More than 100 organizations, municipalities and other stakeholders submitted their comments. A couple of weeks ago, the government of Finland adopted as one of our commitments at the summit. A new government resolution on Finnish democracy policies in the 2020s. This is the kind of a government guideline on work. This resolution sets out six goals for Finland's democracy policies and they relate to functioning and safety of the electoral system, the equal participation rights and open government, democracy education, human rights education and media education. And then of course, inclusive media and culture of open discussions. The operating conditions of civil society are considered important. And finally, Finland's international democracy work will continue. For a democracy to thrive, it is necessary that people and parties can exchange opinions and political views in general and especially during the election campaigns. It is great that digital development has increased access to information and opportunities to take part in public dialogue. At the same time, however, it has also made it easy to spread disinformation, polarize the dialogue, produce all kinds of malice against others and overall challenge the integrity of elections and results. In Finland, the right to vote is inclusive and the process in national elections is pretty straightforward. All those who pass the age limit, it's 18 at the moment, are invited to vote. There's no need for voter registration or any administrative procedures. Just turn up with an ID and write down the number of your chosen candidate on the paper ballot at the election day or the time before you can send your vote in advance. During the past year, however, the electoral turnout has been declining and while it is usually around 60-70%, it is much lower than, for example, in other Nordic countries. And also the turnout is getting unpredictable because the elections, many other things, influence the right to vote and the feeling that I need to go and vote. Voter turnout, of course, differs among population groups. As Finland is aging, the number of young voters is declining, but maybe more tourism is that the share of active voters in their own young age cohort is also going down. Contrary to many other countries, young women in Finland are politically more active than young men. Maybe they have some good role models, I don't know, but also in general in Finland, women tend to vote more often than men do. Because social status and economic status correlate with voting activity. Traditions are important too. Once you learn how to vote, you probably continue to vote. Promotion of voter participation, particularly among youth, is essential. Often substance, the important issues, as well as where and how to express the opinion. This needs to be included even deeper in our education system and now, especially in our civic education system, for the increasing number of new citizens. At the same time, we see positive elements too. We see that young people are actually interested in politics and political influence. They seek new ways to influence. They might find it difficult to associate themselves with the traditional political parties, as they might be more interested in participating in a thematic approach to push their closer to their own thinking and vision for the future. New instruments, such as the Citizens Initiative, have been introduced and it is used and young people are very active in using it. For example, issues, topics such as climate and energy, education, health, mental health, gender issues have been raised to a discussion. This kind of citizen initiative is an instrument where a relative high number of individuals collect support for a legislative initiative to be presented to the parliament. While not many of them actually succeed to make a change, they of course increase the political dialogue of that given topic and in a way force the traditional political parties to take a position. And of course it influences the political parties for their own renewal of their thinking and processes, how to react, how to interact with young voters or young people. Anyway, back to the summit commitments. We hope to bring innovative ideas also on the table to respond to this information and to increase voter turnout through the work with our partners Finnish Innovation Fund, CITRA. It's a government innovation fund. It is important to strengthen the digital information literacy in order to identify how we can be or maybe we are already influenced online. It is an interesting piece of work where new kinds of models for participation and working together in digital environments are developed and tested. CITRA published a guide for digital information literacy in September this year. The guide can be used as a basis for educational materials on the topic and it in a way broadens the concept of media literacy towards the challenges of hybrid media environment. And the best part is here. It can be freely downloaded. I'll have to find the address and I will send that to an idea. CITRA also promotes new methods of participation and influence such as this citizens initiative I mentioned, citizen juries, participatory budgeting as we heard similar type of trials. An important thing is here that these are digital and technological innovations which we tend to think are easier for the young people to use although I'm not quite sure about that. Anyway, continuing the cooperation with partners to promote safe internet for all was among our summit for democracy commitments. One important forum to defend online electoral integrity is the Freedom Online Coalition. A coalition of 30 something countries who believe that the human rights that people have offline must also be protected online. We chaired the coalition in 2021 and continue to work with Canada and the incoming chair which will be the USA. Before I close I'm sure I've used too much time but I wanted to quickly take up the work in relation to our commitment of promoting political dialogue and inclusive multi-party democracy that we do with our NGO partner Demo Finland. In this work special attention is paid to support political processes through parties and specifically enhancing the political participation of women, young people and persons with disabilities. Demo Finland operates in seven countries, some of them in very challenging situations. In Tunisia for example Demo Finland and its partners continue to support the implementation of the Tunisian School of Politics with the name to strengthen the participation of young and upcoming politicians in decision making. Despite of the, how would I say, recent challenging environment for political parties, more than 300 young politicians and civil actors participated in these activities and important dialogues for the future of the country. I think I close here. Thank you very much for this possibility. Thank you Ambassador. I will now give the floor to our colleague and guest from Costa Rica. Please, please ahead. Thank you very much, Ricardo. I'm going to charge my screen. Just one minute. Okay. Thank you, idea for the opportunity to present. What are we doing in Costa Rica? A list in a few aspects. The commitments acquired by the country to submit a democracy implied actions of different institutions and the Minister of Foreign Affairs will be accountable at 2003 submit will present everything. Now I will focus on explaining the efforts made by Supreme Electoral Tribunal which I represent to achieve the education and commitment of young citizens against this and misinformation. Why do we have to invest in digital literacy. What is this very important before we enhance participation of youth. Without realizing all the world entering the digital age, the problem is that we entered there with the sufficient tools to exercise our digital citizenship, especially based on democratic principles and values like respect and how to proceed in there. And this translates into practices undermine the social agreement, such as disinformation, misinformation, and it comes with the polarization and social violence that we see increasing right now, especially in the digital environment. We are in a context with a big a lot of information, a weak civic education context, especially in the Latin American region that I know more. And it is an era of mistrust and disenchantment than digitally has enhanced conspiracy and anti political species are everywhere. Social networks and their business models that we know the algorithm, the echo chamber, the bubble filters are breaking our social models, an era of opinions and beliefs that become dividing ditches running the bridges to dialogue. We are now in an era of health, economic and social crisis around the world. And of course, everything is increased by the dis and misinformation. So what is the Supreme Electoral Tribunal training in responsible digital citizenship? Okay. As you know, the electoral process everywhere has been the focus of dis and misinformation. And that it can be disaster for our countries. Science, it increased mistrust in information in the institutions and the media, and this weakness our democracies, the population in general, and the young people in particular need more informations and tools if we want to enhance the participation of this population. What is the proposal of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal in order to create this training? We create a virtual self training course for digital literacy called Responsible Digital Citizenship. We create this past year in our presidential elections before the presidential elections to provide tools to the citizen in Costa Rica. We focus more in young people, but at the end of the day, many others matriculate in the individual training course and we are very happy about that. This is our platform, as you can see, it's very clear, not complicated at all, and people only have to inscribe and everything is for free. And it's very easy to download even in our cells, we can do the course. The methodology is very clear, as I say, the form is self training is very intuitive, is very interactive, is very visual. We have a lot of videos, small videos and people are, it's easy for the people to do to to study that way, and it's very punctual. We don't want a master's or a PhD class is very punctual in order to people to understand. We have four models in this virtual course. First, the one that is created in order to people protect their own information, the data. And we call the talk there about our finger print and the digital identity. In the second model, we talk about social networks. I mean, everybody in the world right now have at least one social network, but they don't have the knowledge of how these social networks are working, the business model behind them. So we explain people this. And the third model we talk about this and misinformation, how we know this is this information. We provide tools in order to understand that these are fake news or out of context, etc, etc. And in the last one, we call to the actions and we provide also tools and patterns of how be a responsible digital citizenship. And this is very important for us. And we create this course with a cool campaign with a counterpart support, the International Cooperation, various CSOs in Costa Rica getting both the media getting both. So that make us reach a huge amount of people. We have two virtual platforms, the one I show you and another one that was created only for teachers, school teachers, high school teachers. We give them more additional tools in order they work in their classes about these topics. And also we have face to face sessions, not everybody have access to these platforms. So we also provide this course face to face. I give you here some examples. We work with young people at your left. We work also with journalists and communicators in Costa Rica. We give the class to this population in order to they spread around the country. And also we work with people in the rural areas. As you can see in the right, we work with young people in their own high schools, especially outside the capital of Costa Rica. In six months from August 2021 to January 2022, we reach around here is a little more is like 2350 something like that. And we are a planning how to increase the scope for this coming municipal elections in 2024, how to reach more people with this topic. But also we have invest a lot in training in democracy in 10 years of this Institute of Democracy Training. We have created at least 12 publications. We have a little more nine videos and short videos that are now used by the Minister of Education in Costa Rica to create and promote democracy and promote the participation of young people, not only in the schools because we have electoral process in every school and high school of Costa Rica. Very similar that we do in the national and municipal elections, but also from the more of 11,000 students that we reach with our training, many of them are now involved with the political parties, and they are working in a strength democracy, and I think that's a huge goal for what we are doing now. And as you say, I have seven minutes. I tried to hurry, but I'm glad to answer any question that you have. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mariela, for your very interesting presentation. I propose that we go ahead and then we face all questions that comes from the attendees. So I will pass the floor to Narbada, give me a from Nepal. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you everyone. I'm really pleased to share platform with all of you. I would like to take you to the election, local level election of May 2022, in which two of the two of very unconventional candidates, independent candidates, candidates without any political affiliations in the past, won election, one from Kathmandu metropolitan city, the mayor who won the election is just 32 years old, and deputy mayor is even younger, less than 30 years, and another one independent candidate who won the election is from Dharan, eastern commercial center of Nepal. When these two candidates won the election, it changed the way election campaign has been taken place in Nepal. The mayor of Kathmandu, he released his election costing, he completed his election campaigning campaigning with less than $400, which is quite low compared to other election financing, which we can see across the country. Lately we had been very worried about increasing cost of election financing and its connection with electoral integrity. One of the reasons why it was possible for the current mayor of Kathmandu to complete his election campaign in such low budget was the use of social media. He used social media, he increased his presence, he shared his ideas, youths all across the world, all across the Nepal, also youth from Nepal living abroad got connected to him, and they convinced their family members why they should be voting this candidate over other candidates, candidates from old political parties with good support base, and finally he won the election. Taking reference from the local level election, we are now very close to federal and federal level election and provincial assembly election. In five days from today, we'll be voting for federal assemblies and for federal parliament and provincial assemblies. And this time around, political parties with good character base, they have increased their social media presence. And of course, the ones who are driving the soul from the political parties, as well as the independent candidates, and the new political parties are the youth. They are at the center, because they are well placed to create digital contents. They are used to post them online, and they know the drills of using social media campaigning to reach out to voters. So, Election Commission of Nepal allowed for use of online and social media for about a week now, and we can see interesting stuff going on around the social media, social media, and they are very creative, they are very interesting. On the other hand, Election Commission of Nepal, early on, thought through this, thought through how social media platforms and networking sites could be abused for misinformation, disinformation and hate speech. They instituted relevant clauses in Election Code of Conduct. Election Commission of Nepal got political parties signed on the commitment paper to abide by the by the Code of Conduct and election related laws. So, Election Commission also got engaged with the representatives of Facebook. Facebook is one of the highly used social networking site in Nepal, and one of the studies also found that it has been very influential in creating mindset. So, Election Commission organized event seminar, along with political parties to let them know what kind of contents they can upload and how they should be doing their political campaigning without harassing, without defaming, spreading fake news, rumors, and information on those sites. And they have established very good link with Facebook. The Election Commission also tried to get in touch with TikTok. They have had a couple of important meetings with TikTok. According to informal discussion held with the officials working with Election Commission, they could not collaborate more with Google, YouTube, and Twitter, and they are optimistic that in the days to come, they will enhance their collaboration with those social sites as well. And this election saw something very unconventional, unconventional in the sense that more and more independent candidates are seen in the political landscape. They have come up with creative and very innovative political campaigning. I call them unconventional because they are urban race born in 90s or after that, raised urban and educated abroad from prestigious American and European universities. That is not the political scene which we used to see during earlier elections. I would like to share with you a recent tweet by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres where he said, social media platforms based on a business model that monetizes anger and negativity are causing untold damage to societies. And it holds special truth in case of Nepal because we have a very high rate of unemployment. According to recent estimates, there are about 850,000 people staying ideal in and around villages and cities, seeking job with government authorities. Also on an average 400 to 500,000 youth leave this country for foreign employment. In the given scenario where youth are unemployed and their aspirations are not meet with the social and political reality, it's very easy for them to get frustrated and resort to social networking site to vent out their frustrations. So election becomes the prime time for them to vent them out. And sometimes the way that anger and frustration is vented out is quite divisive, polarizing, full of hate comments. So this is very sensitive moment for us. But this is not the role of government alone. This is not the role of election commission alone. There is the role of political parties. There is the role of youth. There is the role of education, role of media, fair reporting, and also the role of big tech institutions, social networking sites. This is a country like Nepal to support to maintain electoral integrity. And election commission is doing the best. There has been limited number of complaints regarding violations of election court of conduct. There are two more days to go for political campaigning. So far, we have not seen around many unpleasant information disorder. The election seems pretty good as of now. And this, we Nepali, we are often very excited when it comes to election. We get frustrated before election, after election, but election day is one of the significant event for us. We always have highest voter turnout rate. And we get pretty excited. So, including myself, everyone is looking forward to November 20th to vote for the election. And I would like to stop myself here. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Narvada, for your very comprehensive and interesting and very actual presentation. I would like to pass now to Beatriz. I made a sub from the National Democraticist. Thank you. Democracy reporting. No worries. I will quickly share my screen as well. Please let me know if you guys see my PowerPoint presentation. Perfect. So let me just quickly adjust now. I see you guys and present at the same time. I will try to be very brief because I think we want to also have time for questions, but good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for the invitation to talk today. I'm going to share a little bit on how DR I approach approaches in election integrity. As you know, I'm not coming from. I'm not a representative of a country, but I am from Brazil. So I thought I would also share a little bit about the Brazilian elections that we just had some weeks ago. So, I'm having a little bit of echo. I don't know if you guys are also hearing that, but I am. Could please all participants mute their microphones. Thank you very much. Thank you. So, without further ado, let me go a little bit in what we already have discussed here today, but what I wanted to talk is. I am a researcher on this democracy and when we are looking at how we behave online how the social media platforms work and how the different online phenomena that we already touched upon here. We know that election integrity is threatened by many of the phenomena that we see online. And this is due to a several number of threats that we look at. So we already talked about this information campaigns, but we also have hate speech that violates laws and silences people we have targeted advertising. With the platforms allowing political ads, for example, we have a lack of transparency in online spending, and we also have foreign actors attempting to manipulate the online discourse. So, at dear I we try to always look at those emerging threats understanding how do they impact democracy and how do these threats impact election integrity. Usually, specifically looking at this information, we look at three main aspects of this information we look at tools, tactics and stories or narrative so tools, the channel of the message, the technical foundation of that content so the deep fake is it a cheap fake we can go into those definitions later on the tactics are kind of like the way they are going to spread that message. And then stories actually what is the message about so in Brazil, for example, we had a lot of disinformation campaigns on the electoral process we have electronic voting machines and there were big disinformation campaigns to try to say that there is a fraud there so you know they are the narratives are kind of like what is the story around that disinformation campaign. And what do we see that those threats impact, not only democracy elections around the world and so on we know that they are harmful to democracy we also look at short and long term harms. So in the short term here, for example, we have voter suppression so that means, for example, giving them the wrong information about the location of voting. You know which documents you need to vote this are kind of in the short term short term harm maybe on the day of the election that happens. We also have other harm such as distrust in the electoral process abuse of vulnerable groups so we see in many countries, also in Brazil. Some politicians trying to convince some people to vote for them by using some sort of power that they have over those those communities it's something that we see. And of course we have the long term harms, which here we see as extreme polarization which I think many of us know this, and also the political apathy so the idea that you stop trusting the information online or the information from, from the government and you become a less informed voter, and also a more apathetic voting, and that could be a reason why voter turnout increases in in an area so this is kind of the approach that dear I has, especially the digital democracy team which is where I come from that we work, but I did want to bring also the youth participation here which is very much of my interest and I wanted to share just a little bit about the Brazilian case. Just so maybe we could also have some insights and have some questions later on. So, in Brazil just to give some background information for those that are not so aware of how our process works. We are not obliged to vote after being 18 years old. So voting is mandatory in Brazil. That means that if you don't vote, you need to pay a fee but the fee is very very small. So it kind of we also have sometimes not such a high voter turnout turnout because we know that the fee is so small. What's interesting here is that in Brazil, when you are 16, you are already allowed to vote. You are not obliged, but you are allowed. So you can start your political life or political participation quite young. I voted for the first time when I was 16 years old in Brazil. In this year for this election, we had over 2 million voters aged between the ages of 16 and 17. And that represented a growth of 50, almost 52% compared to the elections of 2018. I think similar to what Mariela talked in Brazil, we also have a supreme electoral court, which is the institution that takes care of the entire processes. We do have some initiatives with youth. I didn't want to bring them here because I'm not speaking on behalf of them, but after in the presentation you have the link here for the website. However, we still see in Brazil that this, this overall idea that Brazil has a lot of corruption and that sometimes are missing some channels of communication between the younger voters and the government that this pushes them away from being more engaged in the democratic spaces. When we look at social media, for example, I know that Navarda comment on Facebook in Brazil WhatsApp, I know it's a messaging app, but it's very much used by Brazilians. We have this information that 53% of Brazilians trust the news that are disseminated on WhatsApp, which is a big challenge because it's an encrypted message. As a researcher, it's hard to get the data from there to see what they are receiving. And even though social media is so big in Brazil and we have like a lot of young people using when it comes to fact checking and trying to look at the information, see if it's true. Some of them say it's rare that they actually use fact checking websites that you would compare the information but they wouldn't go so far into looking at a fact check. So that kind of says a little bit about how engaged they are also online regarding politics, and I found this very interesting research about youth and democracy in Latin America. And they had this section on Brazil saying that one of the first moments of political awareness for many young people in Brazil is when they see an influencer or they see comments on an influencer profile, talking about politics and that's kind of what awakes them to discuss politics. So again, we just see here how influential it is social media in Brazil. And then I wanted to just bring two examples of tactics used by the younger voters in Brazil and also the techniques used to influence them. What was interesting here for Brazil is that many young people started to create campaigns to find ways to reach older audiences. So in Brazil, in these elections, usually the older, the voter, the more conservative the voter is. However, they were trying to look at the social media platforms and what were other features that they could use. So for example, WhatsApp status and Facebook in Brazil are WhatsApp status is really used by older people in Brazil and they started to have producing materials to be able to post on their WhatsApp status to be able to reach a different audience to get out of their eco chambers to get out of their bubble filters as Maria already presented. So that was really interesting for us to observe. And of course, TikTok became a political space as well with them using videos and trends at the app to share their political views and tactics to influence the young voters that we observed as well was first using the voice of influencers that have a big young audience to actively campaign for one candidate or the other. The candidate here with the red color he has, as you can see, combined here over 30 million followers and he was a very active voice throughout the entire campaign period. And I think he said that some of his videos reached over 100 million people so you can see how impactful that is to have it in Brazil. And another tactic was to use pop culture references to maybe share achievements of a candidate. So here you see those two ladies. One is a very famous singer from Brazil and the other one is a reality show star. They have nothing to do with education and hunger which are the two topics that this they are using their faces there, but it was a way to try to call the attention of younger people that tend to be into pop culture like the influencers that are out there. So it's interesting also because the difference between the candidates this year was around two million votes and that's exactly what we have for for the younger between 16 and 17. So it is a big and important part of the voters for politicians in Brazil. I think as Narvada also said here in the end, there is no silver bullet working at us. Yes, so we know that it's a challenging topic to be, especially when you involve youth participation and how to educate from the beginning to give literacy campaigns and courses because we need to teach people how to detect when a content is manipulated so our approach at the eyes to always say that there is no silver bullet for for the disinformation ecosystem. We have different contexts different tools tactics advancing as we speak right now. So what we believe is that not one stakeholder can solve the problems alone. We need to keep researching and exposing the harms of this information as a CSO, but we also need to push transparency from the tech platforms from the industry. And we also need the government to keep using the power and working to develop legislation such as the dsa that we have now to so we can set the agenda. And I think here it's very important that we are speaking to so many governmental people at right now because it's also the people that we need to convince why media literacy for example should be in the schools curriculum and things like that. So that was the end of my presentation I will stop here so we can go through questions but thank you. Thank you very much everyone. Thank you Beatriz. Very interesting case of Brazil. At the beginning we talked about the US midterm elections but I think that Brazil was also one of the key elections that we've seen in this in the past few months. Really interesting and an election in Brazil being a young country I think that the role of young voter was really important and so the efforts that politicians did to include the youth and to attract their vote was also quite considerable. So I see that there are a number of questions on the on the board, not as many as the previous panel but I think that perhaps so we can we can just tackle a few of them. I saw that there is a question that was not really answered. There was a bit of a mess up with another question being put there as an answer to this question. So the first one would be for for Ambassador Hucca where we have a question about the case of women, Finnish women being more politically active than men. The the the attendee actually wonders how how this happens and what contributed to this phenomenon. Ambassador would you like to share your your view on that? Yes, sure. I can try. I saw the question and it sort of started that has it been for a long or is this a recent development. Looking at the history of Finland one can one can say that it's been there for for quite some time. Actually Finland was in the world number two making it possible for women to vote and stand for a vote and that happened in 1906. Well that was 11 years before we were independent but we had an autonomous parliament at that time. So it has been there. The role has of course the the number of women active in politics was very low but women active in the society has been there all the time. Especially after the Second World War when the men were fighting the women had to take care of the business. And and later then on 70s 80s constant efforts were made to enhance the women's participation in politics. But the interesting thing here is that we have never had quotas. So it's coming from our own development the participation of them. Thank you. Thank you Ambassador. I think that there was a there was a second question that was attached to this one probably by mistake but it was about wanting to hear more about electronic or digital disinformation and the threats it poses to democracy. But I think that the the the presentation from DRI had a very clear sort of explanation of what are the main issues with with the digital disinformation and the tools that that they use to analyze it and to tackle it. So I don't think that perhaps we can skip this one and and go for a new one that was more related to the the presentation from Narabada where the attendee. What quotes a presentation saying that this is an example of politicians using youth as instruments for for their campaign. And the question is how can we ensure that politics is not commercialized I think that the the the feeling here is that politicians use youth unemployment there was also a was also mentioned in our presentation to attract you to offer them jobs in their campaign. So how would you have anything to say about this. I mean, to me it's not really clear whether this is a positive or a negative point that our attendee is trying to point out. I mean once on one hand, you have a youth that is unemployed being given unemployment but for a political campaign. And so I wouldn't see this is necessarily as a bad thing but please, if you'd like to share anything from your side. Yeah definitely I would like to take that. I highlighted situation of unemployment and lack of jobs to so that large number of youths are actively participating in social media to interact to get in touch to access the information. They have plenty of free time and because of unemployment, they get frustrated and the social networking sites becomes the best platform for them to paint out their frustrations. So if anything is broadcasted posted in social networking side, anything negative, the chances are higher that they get circulated around quickly and several times than the positive positive things posted posted online. For example, Election Commission has come up with so many creative contents, some of them are full of humor, informative, it has mobilized influential people, artists, actors to send the message of election, election, voter education, why they need to vote, how they need to vote. But there are, unfortunately, there are very limited number of views and only few thousands, thousands of views and only few of them are shared around. In my opinion, those kind of content should have been shared by all of us. Even I visited the Facebook page of Election Commission when I had to prepare for this panel discussion. In the context of Nepal, youth participation in politics is good. However, they have not been able to take the leadership position. The leadership position is usually occupied by old people who have been in the power or in the leadership position of the party for a very long period of time. Youth need to work within the party, take a lot of initiatives to rise to the top level of the party. So youth participation is not the question here. Meaningful participation, their influence and their voice that counts is important in the context of Nepal. I really appreciate that we once again make this distinction between participation and meaningful participation or positive participation that enhances actually the integrity of the electoral process, which is I think that the reason that we are discussing here. So I think that we are pretty much at the end of our panel. So I would like to really thank all the all this really excellent and interesting presentations. I tried like a really simple wrap up of this because I mean, I think that there will be, we could talk about this for weeks I think. But I think that we all the presentations really agree on, on some, on some points that there is a need for a multifaceted approach from all stakeholders and using different tools to engage the youth in, in the, in the info environment. So no bullet no silver bullet approaches the RIS says, at the same time we see that products, educational products that are in two institutions allies, the evidence, perhaps, but that is my guess, perhaps a bit of a gap between the language used by institutions that tends not to be too appealing to the youth. And so once again, we go back to the need for institutions to adopt the language of the youth by using influencers pop references to gain traction in their messaging. I think that it is, it is a very evident from what's what we was being said so far is that there is not one solution to the soul thing and that a mix between digital, digital education, voter education, digital literacy, establishing or fact checking and debunking organizations, engaging with digital platforms, establishing a code of conducts between political parties, and at the end also legislation are necessary to bring both the engagement of our youth, and also an improvement of the of the of the of the digital ecosystem that an election sees. I leave it to that. Once again, I thank you all. It's been an honor to to meet you and thanks again to idea for organizing this so I pass back the ball to my dear friend and Nikolai over. Thank you very much, Ricardo. And thank you very much to to all of you for this very interesting conversation I think as Ricardo said we could have gone on for quite some, some more time. And I think we're nearing the end but we will, we will have the final say from our, our boss, Sam from the start so we will leave you the work. Well, thank you, Nikolai. Can you all hear me well. Yes, I see people nodding. Thank you very much for a very, very rich discussion. I can say I learned a lot. A few takeaways, three points really that I took from this discussion. First that we have to invest in both old and new ways of getting youth to participate in democracy, the old ways being your elections turn out we have great examples of lowering the turnout age to 16 for instance in Brazil we know that other countries are trying that as well. Getting involved in political parties also an old school institution that remains important as in Ghana. But also all the new forms right so the participatory budgeting that we learned about from Slovakia and also participatory instruments that Finland is using. And then of course all the online methods that we all see around us every day. And those of course come with the risks. We heard about the risks in Brazil, for instance, but also other countries like Nepal where social media are being used also for disinformation purposes, but ultimately, with all that negative news that we read about for social media, it's also an opportunity to reach new audiences, and we have to keep investing in making sure that social media you are used for that purposes to reach youth in ways that youth are listening. And we know that that's the new space that youth are sitting in so that's point one. So secondly also involve people beyond the youth if we want young people to participate. We heard about political party leadership that have to buy in to getting youth on board and only if you get those senior leaderships to open up will you get that space and the same for youth when you want to educate youth on on participation in schools as we heard from Slovakia than parents are important to stimulate citizens youth to do that. So, when we talk youth, we have to talk about including youth in larger structures including your leaderships and parents. We have to disaggregate between youth as we learned as well. Youth are not monolithic. There's boys and girls there's minorities and majorities there's youth in big cities and outside the big cities, and we have to reach them all. So not just those that are already tuned in. And lastly, we heard about the summit for democracy and of course that's important how do we get all these great ideas that came to bear today to be fed into the summit for democracy process and as Tom Miller said at the very beginning, we need to be active. We need to shine, we need to make sure that the youth cohort is one of the more active and successful ones because if the youth cohort doesn't do that then which other cohort will have that energy to shine and to be there for the future. And we can only do that by having measurable commitments as some of you said, commitments that are concrete enough to be implemented but also to monitor in a way that they actually make a difference. So real change as Tom Miller said in the beginning is what we're ultimately after. And that I think is the homework for this cohort to go beyond the great examples that have been mentioned in this discussion and really make sure that it leads to measurable change in a way that changes the future of youth. Now what is the role of international idea in bringing all of this forward international idea will continue to gather member state civil society, as we have done today to inspire other countries and other participants in this summit for democracy. And we will continue to do that in the youth cohort as well as other cohorts. And we'll do that through analysis data, convening all players are active in the summit for democracy and one upcoming way in which we're doing that is on the 13th of December, where we're taking a big lens approach to the upcoming summit, looking back to the previous looking through the upcoming summit next year, March, probably, and review the progress during the year of action that has been in between. And what comes after all the work that has been done in course thus far and how are we moving towards the second summit so I invite all of you to sign up through the idea website or others. Otherwise, approach the organizers of this event so that we can help you to participate in that one which will be an in person event here in Brussels. For those that won't be able to travel to Brussels there will be an online connection so please also do participate but those that are in Brussels I encourage you to be there because that allows you to network and really engage in all of those that will be in the summit. And that brings us to the end of this event I want to thank all the speakers, all the panelists for all the great initiatives that they have discussed you're doing fantastic work and I think we can conclude that what Tom, in the very beginning said this being one of the more active cohorts that has come through through all your presentation so thank you to all the speakers and the moderators you've done fantastic work I want to thank you do in the great colleagues there for their continued support. Thank you to all the participants that have listened in and asked great questions this has really been dynamic and then last but not least the idea team for having helped to organize this your countless effort. Thank you very much and back to you Nikolai. Thank you very much for your very pertinent words I think your conclusions which very much drew together the topics that were discussed today. And also, I mean, I also want to thank again all the speakers and the moderators for the great job today it was it was very very interesting discussions. And of course we're very happy that so many could attend so many participants listen to the discussion. So we will get back to you later on with some more information about the event that we're planning for the 13th of December. And we are also planning to have an article after this event so this will be available online. So with that, thank you very much and I wish you a good week. Thank you. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye bye.