Gen-Forum: What we’ve built and why it has never mattered more
Date:
A reflection from Sriwan Siangjun, Managing Partner, InsightPact
InsightPact is a co-facilitator of the Gen-Forum 2025–2026: Asia-Pacific Virtual Leadership and Learning Series in partnership with the UN Women Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
InsightPact came into Gen-Forum 2025–2026 as a co-facilitator and learning designer – and we leave every session as witnesses to something rare: a virtual room full of young people who refuse to be told that peace and security is someone else’s domain.
The world right now is not making it easy to believe that – and that’s exactly the point.
Gen-Forum 2025–2026 brings together 29 participants from the region, aged 18–35, including Indigenous women, persons with disabilities and LGBTIQ+ persons. They are joined by alumni from the inaugural Gen-Forum 2024, who are taking active roles, fostering peer-exchange and continuity. Altogether, 20 countries in the region are represented.
What does it promise to deliver? Four main things: the space to shape the agenda from within; a deeper expertise on the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda, inclusive governance and the new security challenges reshaping our region; practical skills in advocacy, communication and leadership; and a regional peer-community built on solidarity. For some participants, it also opens pathways to regional events and further engagement in WPS and governance spaces.
With the 2024 Gen-Forum alumni being involved as mentors, resource persons and collaborators, the continuity itself is a statement: this programme is designed to compound, not conclude.
Six sessions in: What we’ve covered, and what we’ve felt
The first sessions – spanning November 2025 to March 2026 – moved through a demanding curriculum: the origins and evolution of the WPS agenda; its four pillars of participation, prevention, protection, and relief and recovery; the intersections of climate change; the digital dimensions of violence and safety; inclusive governance and CEDAW General Recommendation 40; women’s leadership and decision-making; and developing and influencing a WPS National Action Plan (NAP).
Participants practiced 30-second multilateral advocacy pitches to Security Council Ambassadors. They worked through scenario-based exercises on how to engage with NAP processes when doors are barely open. They learned from youth practitioners who have done this – navigated UN mechanisms, built national coalitions, supported their countries’ first WPS NAPs and organized digitally-led protest movements that contributed to legal reforms. The technical knowledge has been rigorous. The skills built are practical and transferable.
But what stands out is the energy. The commitment and the hope that fills these sessions even as speakers describe shrinking civic spaces, funding cuts to front-line women’s organizations and the escalating threats faced by women human rights defenders across the region.
Participants know what’s happening in the world. And they show up.
Young people are not the future of this agenda. They are its present – right now, in their communities, in their countries.
This is not the time to treat the WPS agenda as a side event. It is not the time for symbolic youth consultations. It is the time to resource it, prioritize it and protect the people doing it.
And it is, above all, the time to listen – genuinely listen – to the young women and men who are already doing this work, with less support than they deserve and more determination than many of us.
Don’t build systems for us that weren’t built with us. And don’t mistake our presence in a consultation for our participation in the decision.
Gen-Forum 2025–2026 continues until mid-2026, with more practical skills labs, peer-learning exchanges and pathways for some participants into regional events.
If these first sessions are any indication of what this cohort is capable of, then the remainder are going to matter even more.
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