By EY editorial team | 2 December 2014
Holly Ransom is a woman on a mission. She tells us about her ambition to give voice to the 1.5 billion young people across the G20 and her experiences at this year’s Y20.
Holly Ransom is not your typical university student. While her peers are completing their studies and applying for jobs, Ransom — aged just 24 — is fresh from playing a pivotal role in this year’s Youth 20 (Y20) Summit in Australia. But that’s not all. She is also an entrepreneur who has combined her law and economics degree with working alongside more than 20 nonprofit organizations across the world and currently runs HRE — a consulting, public speaking business — and a leadership development company.
This eclectic range of experiences left her well placed to hit the ground running in her role with the Y20. “I’ve been very fortunate to have the privilege of leading the youth summit component of the G20,” she says. “Our desire has been to strengthen and give traction to the 1.5 billion young people across the G20. Our goal this year was to be viewed as not only a four day summit that produces a document that flows into the G20, but taking on the responsibility to have a 12-month policy conversation.”
This change of approach was rooted in strong support from the Australian summit hosts. “When I sat down and presented to the G20 sherpas in December last year, I said to them if we promise to be more strategic, more focused, collaborative and outcomes-oriented than we’ve ever been before, will you promise to give young people a seat at every G20 meeting/process this year and an opportunity to contribute to every policy conversation? Incredibly, and in credit to them, they have been fantastic at engaging us and have been really proactive to enable us to be the first ever youth summit to do that.”
Policy priorities
The Y20 is the official youth engagement group of the G20 and provides a platform for young people among G20 members to communicate with world leaders about the issues that are important to young people — both raising concerns and proposing solutions. The Y20’s vision for 2014 has been to influence the present and to shape the future by focusing on three key themes: growth and job creation, global citizenship and sustainable development. Job creation was of particular importance, explains Ransom.
“Our big focus is not only that we have 75 million young people unemployed, but we have over 600 million idle youth, meaning they’re not in education, training or employment — that’s one in six young people,” she points out. “What’s scary about this is not only the number, but the ramifications this will have on them as individuals, and many of them are long-term unemployed with no prospects of finding gainful employment. International Labour Organization research shows the ramifications for people under the age of 25 having periods of 12 months or more of unemployment, and what that does for people’s earning potential over the course of their life, are enormous.”
The issue has been on the agenda since the 2012 G20 in Mexico but few, if any, of the policy recommendations have been effectively implemented, admits Ransom, who says that this political inertia underlines the need for a redoubling of efforts. “The need for renewed political effort and resources to be prioritized toward this issue is paramount,” she says. “We were thrilled to see 21 different references to youth in the labor ministers’ documentation, and we were thrilled to see them call for a renewed commitment and focus on this issue at the leaders’ summit in November. The dial so far has moved in the wrong direction since the G20 summit in Mexico, so we need more action and to better analyze what we’re doing and work out what is best practice and to scalethose practices into something workable.”
Summit soundings
The Y20 is more than just a single event in a G20 year; it is a year-long exercise to build the capacity of G20 youth to understand and contribute to the G20’s agenda. Ransom does not lack for summit experience. Having represented Australia at decision-making tables in countries such as the US, Japan and Switzerland, she has also met with the Dalai Lama and presented a number of trade policies and recommendations to the World Trade Organization. But while well versed in summits and high-level diplomacy, her involvement in the Y20 was clearly something to relish.
“It’s been an absolutely phenomenal experience and it’s been the steepest learning curve of my life,” she admits. “The opportunity and privilege to be able to represent the youth summit for the first time ever to finance ministers and central bank governors — looking up from my presentation and seeing all these very senior people in the front row listening to me was just extraordinary. I think I have learned a lot about how to present policy ideas to different groups — for example, the way you engage and present to finance ministers is an entirely different way to engaging with young Australians on a policy process. It has been interesting to learn different ways to achieve the same end goal, but by attacking it from many different communication points.”
Ransom is also keen to highlight that the G20 is far more than just a talking shop and goes on to cite the example of the Global Apprenticeship Network to reiterate her point. “This was initiated in St. Petersburg last year and aims to broaden out the number of apprenticeships available by an incentive scheme with major employers, predominantly throughout the European regions, where there is a really strong base of apprenticeships and related trade industries,” she explains.
“Since then, the initiative has been successfully implemented in many countries. This year it was discussed how this scheme can be expanded beyond apprenticeships as a concept to perhaps a general internship or another training and development-like program that isn’t confined to apprenticeship-type industries. Because obviously the Global Apprenticeship Network is fantastic for countries like Germany where a lot of youth employment resides with apprenticeships, but not so great for countries like Australia, where those industries are a very small part of the pipeline for youth employment. So that is an example where a G20 initiative has got off the ground and where there is great scope to expand and take it to the next level.”
Aussie rules
Ransom believes that Australia has risen admirably to the task of hosting the G20 throughout 2014 — “it’s been phenomenal to watch our public servants and political leaders do such a good job of leading their respective processes of the G20” — and adds that a huge amount has been accomplished already. “Besides the focus on pragmatism and outcomes, I think the legacy of our G20 leadership will be engagement,” she says. “This year there has been a greater focus on the voices and engagement with business, youth and civil society in the processes, perhaps more so than previous years. I think this has positioned us very well.”
This means that Australia has strongly benefited from its role as host, enabling it to take more of a leading role than in years past. “The challenges for us are continually around the tyranny of distance,” she concedes. “It’s great this year because we’ve got our hands on the leadership and we can make a mark in the process, the role for us now is to ensure that this doesn’t only happen every 10 years when we get the opportunity to host the G20 summit. But really ensuring that we continue to contribute to these global conversations, and particularly at a time when the G20 is continually being questioned about its role, if it is impactful and whether or not it has a role in a post-crisis world.”
That Australian policymakers have been so focused on events beyond the country’s borders is also an advantage, suggests Ransom, who says that in this era of global interconnection, there is much to learn from the experiences of other governments. “Domestically we need to ensure that we’re more open to international perspectives and ideas,” she says. “The cross-pollination that we’ve seen this year, and the way that I’ve seen business engage with ideas from Germany and best practices coming out of Brazil and Argentina; the opportunities and the fl ood of ideas that is brought into our domestic consciousness has been incredible.”
“It allows us a global perspective on how we might go about tackling our own problems, which is critical for us,” she adds. “It is probably accurate to say that we often get a little blinkered and are not completely open to the traffic of ideas, perhaps because we’re an island nation and don’t have the networks of, for example, the major US cities or in Europe, so we need to invite these two-way conversations, be seen as contributing and make it known that we’re keen to play a role in these global conversations.”
Now, though, the G20 focus has shifted to the leader summit in Brisbane and then onto the handover to the 2015 host, Turkey. Ransom — while not one to stand still — nonetheless looks back with pride on what the Y20 has accomplished this year. “Our goal was to prove that young people could make the mainstream agenda, and we did just that.”
This feature was first published in the November edition of EY's Citizen Today
