Some numbers just make you laugh when you actually sit with them. Around 7,000 people applied for the Africa regional dialogue of the International Forum “We, the Youth.” Fifty of us got in. Then, of the roughly 27,000 people across every region worldwide, 150 got selected for the actual global summit in Seoul. I still don’t fully know how I ended up in both of those smaller numbers, but I did, and it turned into one of the most unexpectedly clarifying stretches of my year.

Botswana: realizing “youth forum” doesn’t mean what I assumed.

I went into the Botswana regional dialogue with a slightly narrow mental image — a room of young people nodding along to inspirational talks. What I actually walked into was a room full of people who were, in very different corners of the world, already doing things. Someone working on climate adaptation in their community. Someone running a peacebuilding initiative. Me, talking about FarmDirect, at that point still just an idea, a farmer-to-buyer marketplace I wanted to build, with none of the actual data or models behind it yet. Nobody was there to be inspired in the abstract. Everybody was there because they were already mid-project and wanted to be sharper about it, which made pitching something that was still mostly a vision feel a little exposed.

That exposure ended up being useful. I couldn’t hide behind results I didn’t have yet, so I had to get honest about what I actually knew versus what I was hoping would turn out to be true. I stopped pitching it like “here’s my solution, please be impressed” and started talking about it more like a real, unfinished problem I was trying to think through out loud. That version landed better, and it’s roughly the same instinct that, months later, made me actually go get the real data and build the models instead of leaving it as a pitch-deck idea.

Seoul: the strange feeling of the room getting bigger and the conversations getting smaller.

Making it to the global summit changed the scale of everything, this time the room held people from Latin America, Asia, Europe, North America, not just fellow Africans wrestling with adjacent versions of similar problems. And yet, oddly, the conversations that mattered most to me happened in twos and threes, not on the main stage. A late-night conversation with someone working on youth policy in a completely different part of the world, comparing notes on how differently “innovation” gets funded depending on which country you’re standing in. That kind of thing doesn’t show up in a summary of the event, but it’s the part I actually kept.

What I took back with me:

I don’t think IFWY changed my research direction. I still came home and kept working on the same optimization models and the same simulations. But it did something to how I think about who that work is for. It’s easy, deep in a notebook, to optimize for a metric and lose the person on the other end of it. Standing in a room with people from a dozen countries, all trying to solve very specific, very local problems with very limited resources, is a pretty effective reminder that the metric was always supposed to be a stand-in for a person, not the point itself.

I came back to Accra with a slightly bigger network and, more than that, a habit of asking, a little more often than I used to, “who is actually on the other end of this number I’m trying to optimize.”