Youth Messages for Tomorrow: What Rural Youth Want Us to Remember – International Youth Day 2026
For International Youth Day, we asked young people from smallholder farming communities across Latin America, South Asia and West Africa to reflect on one question: what did your elders teach you that you want future generations to know and keep alive?
They answered through poems, memories, drawings and stories about seeds, soil, forests, animals, family and community. Different countries, different languages, and the same few lessons kept surfacing: watch the land closely, keep the seed your mother passed on, care for the soil, and don’t do the work alone. Together, they reveal something easily missed in conversations about the future of agriculture: young people carry vital knowledge about the land, and they are already questioning what is being lost and imagining what should come next.
In Oaxaca, Mexico, Rubi remembers her grandmother reading the sky to understand when the rain would come and when to sow. She remembers her saying, “May your gaze always be turned toward the vastness of the sky, and may your hands never lose touch with the earth, for from it comes life itself.”
In Nepal, Tika writes about the importance of saving local seeds — knowledge passed from grandparents and parents to the next generation. “Our seeds are our identity. Preserving them means respecting life.”
And in Senegal, Wodji describes choosing to return to the land after studying law and political science. “For roots cannot be severed by a diploma,” she writes. She sees her role as transforming her parents’ legacy for the generations to come.
Far from being nostalgic stories about a disappearing past, these are reflections on what is worth carrying forward and what needs to change. At a time when young people face enormous pressure, their voices matter to the future of food, farming and the natural world. Rural youth have the potential to bring inherited knowledge together with new ideas, skills and ways of organizing. The challenge is making sure they have the opportunities and space to do so.
So this International Youth Day, listen to what young people from farming communities have to say.
We’ve gathered the submissions into a multimedia story, each one shown in the language it was written in and in English.
“May your gaze always be turned toward the vastness of the sky, and may your hands never lose touch with the earth, for from it comes life itself.”
La mirada, rubi, mexico