CYP is Dedicated to the Advancement of Youth Participation in Politics. What Comes Next is Tracking How Many Young MPs are In Office, and Helping Them Overcome Major Institutional Barriers.

According to the Inter Parliamentary Union's 2025 report on youth participation in national parliaments, just 2.8% of the world's MPs are 30 or younger, a figure that has not moved since 2023. This is the first stall in over a decade of otherwise slow progress towards creating more youth exposure in parliaments. More than a third of parliamentary chambers worldwide have no MP under 30 at all. Despite this truth, half of the global population is under 30. The gap between who is governed and who governs is not closing as the world gets increasingly younger, which is exactly the gap that the Centre for Youth Policy’s work is addressing.

Not only is CYP the premier think-tank dedicated to youth policy, politics, and matters internationally, but the research and reports produced are tailored to solve the problem of what is limiting young people from political power. The CYP’s After They Win report, for example, was a months-long research project aimed at finding the root causes of young MPs leaving office after being elected. The main findings were that, despite most young elected officials having ample support in their election from youth wings and political youth activists, that support falls out from under them while in office, preventing them from garnering substantial political influence. This can manifest in having a lack of staff, enduring workplace harassment, and experiencing burnout.

We also hold a Global Youth Ministry tracker, verifying which countries currently have an acting, dedicated youth ministry as a part of their cabinet, tracking political appointees across roughly 220 countries and territories. The next phase extends that same logic to legislatures: creating a database identifying young MPs worldwide, verified country by country, and eventually cross-referenced against the current ministers dataset.

What is Next For CYP

Young MPs are, structurally, hard to find. Parliamentary directories rarely list age, especially in remote nations. The IPU's own aggregate figures are useful for the global picture regarding age metrics, but they do not produce a list of names, offices, and contact information for these young MPs. CYP’s goal, now, is verifying who these officials are using the same batched, language-matched search methodology built for the ministries tracker. The creation of this database is the first step that must be done before embarking further on any of the other research questions we plan to study, including the success rate of youth quotas and the historical longevity of young MPs. With this project, we aim to find what young MPs are actually able to accomplish in office, with real evidence behind them.

The Problem The Project Can Help Solve

As discovered without After They Win Report, getting elected young is only the first hurdle. Nearly a third of the world's parliamentary chambers, per the IPU, have zero MPs under 30, and upper houses in particular remain difficult for young legislators to enter at all, mostly due to age-based eligibility rules. The young MPs who do make it in often arrive without the staff, support, and/or institutional knowledge that tenured MPs have, particularly in smaller or newer democracies where legislative support structures are already thin. A 25-year-old MP with a mandate to act on climate policy or constituent services can still be functionally alone in an office with no one to help them research a bill, respond to mail, or build out their social media. With our current research goals, we can begin to identify where young MPs are most in need of support.

Where the Internship Program Comes In

To close the gap, we plan to launch an internship program. University students interested in politics are matched, based on region and issue interest, with young elected officials who need more staff, an arrangement CYP has already piloted with representatives in Malta and the Gambia, for example. Intern responsibilities can include drafting legislative questions, researching climate and energy policy, building constituent databases online for greater exposure, and helping officials establish social media presence. The program is now expanding recruitment of young MPs in the Caribbean Community, Pacific Islands, Nordic, and Eastern African regions, with the goal of placing interns starting in the fall semester. Unlike a domestic internship, students work directly with a sitting official in a governmental system different from their own, a commitment that CYP oversees through regular check-ins with both intern and representative to make sure the work is substantive on one end and useful on the other. With this program, we hope to come one step closer to solving issues we have highlighted that impede young elected officials, while also engaging young people with politics early on.

The database and the internship program are, in that sense, two halves of the same problem. One makes young MPs visible in the first place, while the other makes sure that they are not left to tackle all aspects of their job alone.