The Global Emerging Leaders Forum: What CYP Built in Goa

In April 2026, CYP published After They Win, a 12-month survey of 100 young elected officials across six regions. The headline finding was that 71% said it's easier to win office than to stay in politics. More than half of the survey’s participants weren't confident they'd still be in politics five years out. The report's conclusion was that political systems have become skilled at recruiting a new generation of young leaders, whether for optics or through youth quotas, but those systems could not retain those young leaders. The problems pushing young leaders out of office were not personal: they were structural. Young officials arrive in office with little to no staff and, as such, limited research support. They're paraded as symbols of generational change during the campaign and sidelined the moment they're inside the building. Left without formal peer networks, many build their own out of necessity, and succumb to the reality of their needs for sufficient leadership going unmet.

Three months later, CYP ran its first Global Emerging Leaders Forum on Democracy: a closed-door retreat in Goa, India, bringing together 15 young elected officials from more than 11 countries, in partnership with Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung India. Unlike the usual circuit of youth-in-politics conferences, this one wasn't built to teach delegates about democracy in the abstract. It was built as a direct answer to what CYP's own research had just found was missing.

That shows up in the design choices. Delegates left with tools that would help them achieve their political goals, gain exposure, and add nuance to their governing abilities. CYP gave them a full digital profile buildout – professional photography, video, on-camera interviews, and country-specific media assets, from social logos to full website redesigns – aimed squarely at the communications gap nearly two-thirds of After They Win respondents said they didn't have. Multiple workshops were dedicated to practical AI literacy: workshops on AI governance and interoperability, and on using AI tools for legislative research, constituent response, and policy communication. CYP taught that AI may not be a staff member, but it can be utilized as a working substitute for the research and legislative capacity 90% of survey respondents said would change their decision to stay in politics.

The Forum itself was deliberately mixed so "no two people came from the same silo," and built to manufacture the kind of cross-border peer network that respondents in the survey had been improvising for themselves. As such, the delegates experienced a bonding experience without screens and any outside influence, as CYP led a day in the woods to bring the young leaders closer.

While the three-day retreat may not fund a legislative researcher's salary or guarantee anyone's renomination – just a couple of teh institutionalized barriers that After They Win mentions – it is a marker of where CYP's own institutional attention is heading. From measuring the problem to building the solutions and infrastructure CYP research says is missing. As the report itself put it: the last decade of youth political reform was organized around one question: how do we get young people into office. The next decade's question concerns what happens to youth once they're in, and how we can assist.

Centre for Youth Policy · Global Emerging Leaders Forum, Goa, India, July 27-30, 2026