The IYTT launches "Memento" Lecture Series featuring Namatai Kwekweza

The International Youth Think Tank, in collaboration with WELEAD Trust and, thanks to the support of the German Africa Foundation, runs a European African lecture series featuring African leader, social entrepreneur, and human rights advocate Namatai Kwekweza. This initiative emerges at a historical moment when the world is experiencing a re-ordering of power and political priorities. Great power rivalry, the spread of autocracy and the entrenchment of global capitalism are favouring techno-feudal governance models grounded on fear and political polarisation, eroding a global governance system founded on multilateralism. The objective is to provide young people, scholars, executive professionals, and others with system-level literacy and encourage critical reflection by centring an African perspective on youth leadership, democracy and human rights. In doing so, the objective is to position Africa as an active normative and geopolitical actor on the global stage, and young generations as the leading force to create future oriented, ethical and inclusive institutions.

Titled MEMENTO: Memory, Hope and the Birth of a New Order the lecture discusses the structural transformation of the international system in the 21st century. As the post–Cold War liberal order fragments, new configurations of power emerge across political, economic, and technological domains. Drawing on debates around capitalism, techno-feudalism, and digital sovereignty, it explores how economic power, bureaucratic health, and technological control reshape global governance. The lecture encourages young people to remember: death, sacrifice, friendship, hope, justice, the Colonial Past, courage, their youth, the Future, love, connection, and Ubuntu.  Conceiving memory as a record of the past, but also a compass for the future, the act of remembering becomes an empowering action for young people to recognise that they hold the power to build the world they want to live in. This theme and purpose are grounded in the acknowledgement of politics as an architecture of human care founded on individual dignity, where power is exercised with empathy.

Namatai Kwekweza is a 27-year-old African leader, social entrepreneur, and human rights advocate. She founded WELEAD Africa at age 18, and she champion youth leadership, women’s empowerment, and civic engagement across the continent. As the Regional Director of WELEAD Africa, she leads initiatives enabling young people to influence policy and drive social change. Recognized globally, Namatai is the 2025 German Africa Award laureate, 2023 inaugural winner of the Kofi Annan Next Gen Democracy Prize, a WalkAbout Prize recipient, and a Fellow at the School of International Futures, shaping long-term global policy discourse. Namatai is an award-winning professional public speaker with Toastmasters Southern Africa and uses public speaking as a tool to challenge systemic inequities and cultivate a new generation of ethical, courageous leaders.

The Lecture Tour will reach five European cities – Gothenburg, Berlin, Krakow, Paris, and a city in the Netherlands – as well as three African cities. Each lecture will be organised as an event of the duration of 1h and 30 minutes where Kwekweza will deliver her keynote speech and engage in a moderated dialogue, followed by a reception and possibility of networking. The initiative is supported by the German Africa Foundation.