Asia Pacific yIGF 2018
Vanuatu

Our regular activities included an Idea Wall session, where participants put down their ideas about Internet Governance; a role-play session where participants took on various roles such as local ISPs and government to discuss a topic, which this year was “How to improve gender diversity”. It was interesting for us as outsiders to hear from our local participants as to how they used the Internet and their challenges. For example, for many people, the usage of the Internet was largely limited to social media and content platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. There were also some concerns about the Internet eroding cultural values and norms. We also heard how a lot of the education at the University of South Pacific was conducted through the Internet, including remote lectures and submission of assignments, and how crippling poor Internet access was in these applications.

Our sessions were further brought to life by the appearance of special guests. As a veteran of the Internet Governance community and chair of the APrIGF MSG, Rajnesh Singh of the Internet Society shared his experience in a frank and heartfelt conversation with our participants. Raj’s sharing resonated with many of us, and highlighted not only the challenges faced, but also how it was sometimes difficult to strike a balance with some of the possible solutions. Similarly a morning lightning session with Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, escalated into the first open consultation session with the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, a unique experience for our participants. Our youth sessions were capped off with our mini town-hall sessions, before joining the main town hall sessions at the APrIGF main hall.

We are very grateful to our hosts for this opportunity to organise this exciting event. We hope our participants enjoyed it as much as we did. With Vanuatu potentially hosting their own national IGF, we hope our activities can help ignite further interest in Internet Governance for youth.

The report of yIGF 2018 Vanuatu is now available on our website, you may click here to find out more.