The Hoe Takes the Habit Off: Old Hands and Young Blades Co-Author the Lusaka Declaration.

By Palesa Meva, International Youth Think Tank Fellow and one of the participants of ICLD Alumni conference in Lusaka 7-9 October 2025

For years, “youth inclusion” has strutted across conference stages like a hoe in a nun’s habit, a blunt, earth-scarred tool of honest labor draped in the starched white of performative sanctity. Panels polish the rhetoric of empowerment, pledges sparkle with participation, yet the rooms brim with the same silver-haired gatekeepers; officials, donors and experts whose own youth expired decades ago but whose grip on the microphone never seems to age. They invite “the youth” as ornaments of progress, not partners in creation. They plaster youthful faces across programs and brochures for the sake of optics, not impact, a performative nod to diversity while the decision-making remains exclusively adult. Panels overflow with custodians explaining what the youth needs, custodians who haven’t been “youth” for decades, who equate young people with potential statistics rather than people with agency. Custodians orchestrate every discussion, design every program, and decide in advance whose voice is acceptable.

The few young people who make it through the gates are often those who have already been polished to perfection, fluent in institutional language, safe enough not to disturb the peace and impressive enough to be displayed. The raw, messy, radically rebellious ones that might actually uproot the status quo? Systematically sidelined. Activist campaigns are clipped into soundbites, dissenting opinions politely ignored, while the custodians pat themselves on the back for “listening” as if a curated nod constitutes empowerment. It’s a theater of compliance, a monologue from the pulpit of power, with youth reduced to props in a scripted illusion that progress is happening. Real agency? Real disruption? Off-limits! The hoe parades as pious but never digs.

The Lusaka Declaration arrived and shook things up
The ICLD–UNZA Alumni Conference in Zambia 7-9 October 2025 didn’t unsettle the hierarchy by accident; it shattered it on purpose. It offered a rare glimpse of what youth inclusion could actually look like. Youth weren't wheeled in for the photo-op; they were handed the chisel and told to carve. It turned the old irony inside out through a living symbiosis, seasoned councilors and fresh activists sat at the same table, trading decades of institutional memory for the electric urgency of under-30 vision. Veteran planners poured reservoirs of policy know-how into youth-led peer circles on climate and health, while the young fired back with digital-native tactics and street-level data no spreadsheet had ever captured.

By Day 3, this cross-pollination crystallized around the Lusaka Declaration, custodians laid down frameworks tested in council trenches, the young carved in veto power for youth councils, ring-fenced budgets for SDG clubs and hospital seats for child-rights ambassadors. Every clause bore dual fingerprints, calloused and fresh until the document emerged not as a compromise but as a hybrid organism, old wisdom giving structure, young fire giving velocity, read aloud in a plenary where every generation had inked the margins. Inclusion ceased to be a gesture, it became a shared bloodstream, pulsing with inherited craft and insurgent hope.

The habit hit the floor. The hoe stood bare, stripped of its disguise, sharp, weathered and finally put to use. I saw power crack open. A young voice hijacking the policy debate, raw edges unpolished and unapologetic youth landing blows that forced gray-haired custodians to rethink their certainties. spaces where the usual suspects, the messy, the furious, the uninvited were not just heard but weaponized. Custodians did not sermonize, they shared, and youth participants did not perform gratitude, they questioned, they built and they wrote.

Together, “old hands and young blades” co-authored the Lusaka Declaration, not as a symbolic gesture, but as a genuine act of co-creation. In that moment, the false purity of inclusion-as-performance gave way to the messier, more beautiful truth of intergenerational labor. It wasn't flawless utopia, but it was a goddamn rupture from the scripted farce of "youth engagement." That glimpse lit a fuse in me. Real inclusion demands gut-wrenching surrender, not a mic, not a hashtag, but the full arsenal of agenda, argument, and raw authority. Lusaka proved the cycle can shatter if you're brave enough to let it.