Dear colleagues,
As implausible as it sounds, Nepal’s interim prime minister was chosen last September on Discord, a chat app built for gamers. Within a fortnight of protests that had begun over a social media ban and in which dozens were killed, thousands of young people voted online for a candidate, and the country’s first woman prime minister took office.
That story came up over coffee recently with a friend, when we were meant to be discussing something else entirely. She had been reading about youth movements and was impatient with the usual complaint that the young have given up on politics. The surveys are real enough, she conceded: turnout among the under-30s is low almost everywhere, and trust in parliaments and parties has been falling for a generation. But read the same surveys differently and you see alienation, not apathy. Politicians have stopped trying to reach young people, so young people have gone around them. Do-it-ourselves politics, she called it. In 2024 Kenyans in their twenties, ‘leaderless, tribeless and partyless’ by their own description, used TikTok and WhatsApp to explain a finance bill to each other, to coordinate, and finally to stop it, at a cost of dozens of lives. In 2025 the pattern spread to a dozen countries, from Indonesia to Madagascar. Everything is political, she said, and this generation, or enough of it, knows it.
When Kent relayed that conversation to Sarah, we both saw the gender justice movement’s predicament in it: the gender movement has the institutions and the evidence, the youth movement has the energy and the numbers, and neither yet has the organisation to hold ground.
This month we publish The Organised Many, drawing on four convenings and a survey of more than 150 gender justice leaders. Its central finding is uncomfortable. The forces attacking gender equality are not winning because they have better evidence or arguments. They are winning because they are better organised: disciplined, well-funded, united on principles even when divided on details, and fluent in the narrative and digital tools. We, meanwhile, have brought a technical toolkit to what is a contest over power and politics, and have let ourselves be split by definitions, by competition for shrinking funds, and by a habit of self-silencing that one participant likened to self-stigma.
The young protesters had the reverse problem. Energy without structure. When everyone is responsible, nobody is, and movements that toppled governments in weeks struggled to hold ground in the months that followed. The lesson is not to choose between the two. The many only beat the organised few when the many get organised too.
There is reason for hope, and not the sentimental kind. Global Nation’s annual survey of 22,000 people in 31 countries found support for international cooperation rising this year for the first time in years, across every generation. The threats are making people value what they stand to lose. ‘Hope is a political decision we have to make every day,’ one participant told us. We agree, and we keep making it.
Please read the report. Then help us act on one of its calls: our movement-wide consultation on a digital hub is now open, and it needs your advice. And if you have not yet signed the open letter to the next UN Secretary-General, that is the quickest way to be counted among the organised many.
In solidarity,
Kent and Sarah
Co-CEOs, Global 50/50
Read the Gender Dispatches
On the first Tuesday of each month, we share our newsletter on advancing gender justice across health, law and beyond. Each edition features a letter from our Co-CEOs alongside the latest evidence, open funding calls and ways to act.
