Opinion – Ronaldo Lemos: Young people want to change the world and start new types of mobilization

There is a new kind of impact mobilization in the world we are living in. The protagonists are children and adolescents who have decided to take on local or global causes in their own name. In other words, it is the emergence of child activists, who are perhaps the main news on the global political scene.

The best known names are Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg and Pakistani Malala Yousafzai. However, their planetary fame is just the tip of a deeper phenomenon. There are child activists for all tastes. For example, Syrian Mohamad Al Jounde founded, at age 16, a school for refugees in Lebanon and received the international peace award from the KidsRights foundation.

Or even the impressive trajectory of the Indian Haaziq Kazi, now 15 years old. At 9, he designed a prototype for removing plastic from the oceans. At 12, he created the Ervis Foundation, which mobilizes actions around the world in defense of the oceans, including training other children interested in the cause. His foundation offers workshops to schools around the world. In addition, it is developing a model of ship to collect plastic, also called Ervis.

In the US, the activist Thandiwe Abdullah stands out, who, before turning 17, already had a list of notorious actions, such as the creation of the Youth Vanguard within the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2018, she spoke to 500,000 people in Los Angeles and appeared in Time Magazine’s Influencers List.

Also in the US, 13-year-old Sidney Keys founded the BooksnBros initiative, aimed at promoting reading among young people, especially of African-American literature. He likes to define himself as a “young CEO” and mobilizes schools across the country to participate in the initiative.

Brazil is not left out of this wave. At COP26, the young Txai Suruí stood out, giving one of the most remembered speeches at the conference. From the paiter-suruí ethnic group, she created the Indigenous Youth Movement of Rondônia, which already has almost 2,000 members. In addition, she was the first member of her people to attend law school.

Last year, The Washington Post newspaper also highlighted 11-year-old Brazilian Kauã Rodolfo, who became an ambassador for the Plant for the Planet initiative, aimed at planting trees. Interestingly, the initiative was created by young German Felix Finkbeier and his classmates when he was 9 years old (today, he is 24).

This mobilization of such young people has several reasons. One is the context of social media, which allows for global mobilization with few resources. Another is the discomfort with the state of the planet among young people. Today, 8% of European teenagers between 12 and 18 years old suffer from depression, according to the European Health Authority, and 25% develop some mental health problem annually.

Research published in The Lancet magazine also showed that for 75% of young people between 16 and 25, the prospect of the future is “daunting”.

More than that, there is a generational failure: if the generations that are in power fail, it is time to look for new leaders.

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