SIDE EVENT AT THE 2026 ECOSOC YOUTH FORUM “Innovate, Unite and Transform: Youth Shaping the Road to 2030”
Organized by: AFS Intercultural Programs
April 15, 2026, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM, NY Time/EST
From Principles to Practice: Intercultural Learning as a Pathway to Meaningful Youth Participation in the United Nations
About the event
AFS Intercultural Programs has worked for over 70 years to develop intercultural competence and global citizenship in young people across more than 50 countries. Its work is rooted in a simple premise: that sustained, structured cross-cultural experience changes how young people understand the world and their capacity to act in it. Young people who have lived across borders develop the empathy, adaptability, and cross-cultural communication skills that multilateral processes depend on, yet rarely invest in building.
The United Nations Secretary-General’s Core Principles for Meaningful Youth Participation, adopted under the Pact for the Future, provide an important framework for how institutions should engage young people in intergovernmental processes. AFS’s model of intercultural education speaks directly to several of these principles. Principle 02 (Accessibility and Inclusion) and Principle 03 (Diversity and Representativeness) are central to AFS’s program design, prioritizing geographic, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity among participants. Principle 08 (Capacity Building for Youth and Duty Bearers) reflects exactly what intercultural learning does: it builds the core competencies young people need to engage meaningfully in complex international environments. Principle 11 (Intergenerational Collaboration) mirrors the relational model AFS has practiced for decades through host families, school integration, and community exchange.
The gap this side event addresses is structural. Member States and UN entities have now committed, through the Pact for the Future, to meaningful youth participation. But participation without preparation is tokenism. Young people arriving at intergovernmental processes without intercultural competence, cross-cultural communication skills, or experience navigating institutional diversity are set up to observe rather than shape. AFS’s model addresses this gap directly, and this event presents it as a concrete implementation pathway for the Core Principles.
Speakers:
- Daniel Obst, President & CEO, AFS Intercultural Programs (TBC)
- Ali Mustafa (Moderator) (Confirmed),
- Nikki Lebenson Angulo, AFS Intercultural Programs (Confirmed),
- Hugo Enrique Osorio, AFS Youth Assembly (Confirmed),
- Joyceline Kwarko, AFS Youth Assembly (Confirmed),
- Rama Budhathoki, AFS Youth Assembly (Confirmed),
- Mohammed Fidah, MISK Foundation (Confirmed)
- Yumna Khan, AFS Intercultural Programs (TBC)
This event will:
- Demonstrate how AFS’s intercultural learning model operationalizes the UN Core Principles for Meaningful Youth Participation — particularly on accessibility, capacity building, diversity, and intergenerational collaboration
- Present practical evidence on how cross-cultural exchange prepares young people for substantive — not symbolic — participation in intergovernmental processes
- Facilitate dialogue between civil society practitioners, UN representatives, and youth on what “capacity building for youth and duty bearers” (Principle 08) should look like in practice
- Identify how intercultural education organizations like AFS can be formally partnered with UN entities and Member States to support implementation of the Core Principles at scale
- Produce specific recommendations on integrating intercultural competence development into national and multilateral strategies for SDG 17 partnerships ahead of 2030
The discussion will explore the following topics:
- What specific intercultural competencies should that capacity building develop, and who is currently responsible for delivering it?
- How does AFS’s exchange model address accessibility and inclusion barriers, and where does it fall short?
- What does intergenerational collaboration look like in a UN intergovernmental setting, and how do intercultural programs build it before young people arrive?
- If a Member State wanted to use intercultural education as a tool to implement the Core Principles domestically, what would a practical partnership with an organization like AFS look like?