Europe asks ITU to count youth participation, not badges

Who Was in the Room—and Who Spoke? Europe Rewrites ITU’s Youth Count.

Why it matters

A proposed ITU revision would make three Bureaux report how young people attend and engage, while inviting states to put them in official delegations.

Daniel Kade25 October 2026 at 14:13 UTCReading Time 2 minLast update: 25 October 2026

Europe asks the ITU to distinguish youth attendance from meaningful participation.

Summary

Europe proposes that each of ITU’s three Bureaux collect and report the levels and forms of youth attendance, participation and engagement in its sector activities.
The draft invites Member States to include young people in official national delegations and asks the Secretary-General for an annual written account of the youth perspective in ITU work and staffing.

A conference badge is easy to count. A contribution to the agenda takes more work. Europe’s proposed revision of ITU Resolution 198, filed as addendum 39 to contribution 75, asks the Union to distinguish the two. Directors of all three Bureaux would gather data on the level and form of young people’s attendance, participation and engagement, then report to their sector advisory groups.

The 2022 resolution already endorsed youth empowerment, Generation Connect, digital-skills work and annual Council reports. It also kept activities within existing financial resources. The new draft gives the count a sharper home. The Secretary-General would work with the Gender and Youth Office to coordinate activities across sectors and submit an annual written report on how a youth perspective enters work programmes, management and human-resource development. The text also recognises the existing Youth Advisory Board and young-professional initiatives.

The most consequential invitation goes to Member States. They would consider placing youth delegates in their official national teams at major ITU conferences, taking gender balance into account. The state still chooses its delegation and carries the formal mandate. A young adviser on that team, however, can encounter the actual negotiating documents rather than a parallel programme across the hall.

There is an honest measurement problem here. Attendance, participation and engagement are three different columns; the draft asks each Bureau to collect all three. Whether the columns become useful depends on what the reports show about roles, contributions and follow-up. PP-26 will decide whether to adopt the revision. If it does, the next advisory-group report can tell readers more than how many badges were printed.