Zim to co-host youth summit

Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
ZIMBABWE will co-host the 2021 edition of the Breaking Down Borders African Youth Summit (BDBA), joining four other countries in bringing together youth leaders from across the African continent and the diaspora.

The summit, which will be celebrating its fifth anniversary this year, which has engaged delegates in over 60 countries on the continent and beyond, aims to drive robust conversation and build collaborative networks made up of African youth in social and commercial entrepreneurship and leadership.

While Botswana will play main host to the physical summit, Zimbabwe is one of four other countries that will plug in as co-host of this exciting hybrid gathering of young leaders. The other co-hosts of the summit, which will take place from 25 to 28 May, are Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.

BDBA Co-Founder, Nthabiseng Modjadji, said the summit, which will run under the theme, “Young people in Africa: Collective Participation and Power Beyond the Cpvid- 19 Pandemic”, will give young people on the continent a chance to set the agenda for sustainable development.

“We founded BDBA to be a collaborative and inclusive platform for African youth, by African youth.

“Our mission has and will always to be to host a platform where African youth set the agenda for deliberation on the renewal and sustainable development of the continent. As the BDBA Youth Summit celebrates its 5th Anniversary, we found it important to further position the Summit as an accessible platform that young people from different regions of the continent can take ownership of and we are so excited that our network in Botswana, representing the Sadc region, have shown such an overwhelming commitment to hosting this year’s Summit 2021.”

The Breaking Down Borders Africa Youth Initiative is a multi-platform initiative that includes education, empowerment drives, as well conferences.

Founded by a youth collective in 2016, the initiative manages and organises various events, programmes and interventions that centre on youth leadership. In 2017, the Initiative launched the Summit, which has become its flagship project, and have hosted an arts and culture tour of the continent, arts installations and other conference format events in partnership with other organisations

Previous speakers of the Summit include founder of Jibilika Arts Trust and Multiple award-winning activist Plot Mhako, Nigerian entrepreneur Adebola Williams, Kenyan political activist and photo-journalist Boniface Mwangi, and South African youth activist and author Zulaikha Patel.