I had goosebumps before I reached the end of the walkway. For Omani Youth Day, the Youth Centre had turned the space into a passage through a year's worth of work, installations and projects appearing around every turn, and someone had thought carefully about how each one would meet a visitor. I kept slowing down to look again. Seeing that work celebrated at the highest levels of government gave the evening a weight the young people had built for themselves.
The theme for the year was Azm, resolve, and the whole of it had been assembled in under 7 days. There is an arithmetic we apply to work of that size, built from years of watching how long such things take, and it landed here on a team with no part in the projects it came from. Behind the week sits an operation running since 2022, through thousands of contracts with small and medium enterprises and hundreds of training programmes, almost none of it landing on a night anyone attends. The ability was already in the building; the week brought it somewhere people were looking. We left talking about what other government projects might learn from it.
Attending as a member of that board for the first time brought pride, and responsibility settled in behind it. Much of my working life has gone into arguing that young people ought to have a seat at decision-making tables, and holding one of those seats feels nothing like arguing for it. For years the argument travelled outward from wherever I was sitting. Some of it now arrives at me.
Two weeks earlier, at the inaugural Annual Meeting of Global Future Leaders, I heard the Forum present its latest youth survey. Some 9 in 10 young people report that climate change already affects their daily lives, and artificial intelligence is unsettling what they expect work to ask of them. Even so, 2 in 3 expect better economic prospects than their parents. Through my work on the Forum's Global Shapers board, I have met many of them, clear about the uncertainty ahead and making plans anyway.
An expectation held on those terms puts a question to the people positioned to answer it. Opportunity has an address. A young Omani in Musandam starts with fewer employers within reach and a narrower set of people who can open a door, and the soft openings announced that evening, in her governorate and in Dhofar, begin to close the distance.
The Centre entered its own chapter this year, with financial and administrative independence and a mandate to seek young people's views when policies concerning them are shaped. A signed agreement arrives with a photograph and a date. A plan altered because of something a 24-year-old said in a meeting earns neither, so nobody will notice the first time the mandate is honoured, or the first time it is set aside.
The young Omanis behind that evening have shown what trust produces when it is handed over without conditions. The work that follows sits in budgets and in meetings where carrying on as planned is the easiest thing available, none of it photographed, and I will be in some of them. The pause after a young person says the inconvenient thing lasts a few seconds, and whoever fills it decides what the mandate was worth. I have spent years on the speaking side of that pause. I am about to learn what I do on the other one.
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