Theme 9: Powering progress on AMR

• Session 21 – Next‑Gen AMR: Youth leadership for One Health action
• Closing Keynote Session – Lessons, leaders, and leverage: Navigating politics and collective action

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Session 21 – Next‑Gen AMR: Youth leadership for One Health action

Representatives of the Quadripartite Working Group on Youth Engagement spotlighted youth‑led initiatives across regions, from grassroots stewardship drives to data‑savvy campaigns that shift prescribing norms. The session demonstrated what authentic youth engagement looks like when it is designed to influence decisions rather than simply add voices and how to back it with resources, metrics, and seats at the table.

Summary

Session 21 positioned young people as active contributors to AMR solutions across One Health systems, not just future stakeholders. The discussion showed how youth‑led initiatives are already influencing behaviour, policy, and practice when engagement is built to share power rather than simply collect voices.

Examples spanned regions and sectors—from community‑led water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions near schools and livestock markets, to urban campaigns tackling unsafe antimicrobial disposal, self‑medication, and biosecurity risks. Several of these youth‑led initiatives were supported through The Trinity Challenge, which provided seed funding and a global platform for young teams to test, adapt, and scale One Health interventions grounded in local contexts.

These initiatives demonstrated how young people combine local credibility, social science insight, and digital fluency to reach communities that formal systems often struggle to engage. Campaigns were tailored to context and language, built with communities rather than for them, and measured not only by reach, but by changes in practice such as improved hygiene behaviours, safer disposal of antimicrobials, and strengthened biosecurity awareness among farmers.

A central message was that meaningful youth engagement requires more than enthusiasm. Effective initiatives were backed by mentorship, modest but flexible funding, and platforms that enabled youth to co‑design interventions, evaluate impact, and share tools openly for replication. Where youth had access to decision‑makers, through civil society partnerships, health facilities, or government engagement, their work shifted from awareness‑raising to sustained action.

The session also addressed persistent barriers: tokenistic participation, limited funding pathways, weak monitoring and evaluation, and fragmented opportunities across sectors. Youth engagement, the speakers argued, must be built deliberately into national AMR responses, with clear roles, accountability, and feedback loops. When youth leadership is embedded by design, AMR responses become more adaptive, inclusive, and resilient over time.

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Closing Keynote Session – Lessons, leaders, and leverage: Navigating politics and collective action

Discussion 1: Lessons in AMR  

This education segment translated the summit’s AMR urgency into a curriculum reality check: if AMR is to become ‘activity and awareness’ across society, it has to be embedded early and delivered by educators. The discussion linked recent global momentum (including UNGA calls to strengthen AMR education in primary and secondary schooling) to the practical levers that make school change stick: formal curriculum revision, cross‑disciplinary ownership, and teacher implementation support.  

Drawing on climate education, Paula Taylor described how climate change has typically remained owned by science teachers and taught late, with attention to causes but not broader implications. Her solution was to treat the current iterative Australian curriculum review as a rare policy moment, backed by a multidisciplinary position paper that spreads ownership across subjects and sequences learning in age‑appropriate ways. She also highlighted that Australia’s ‘Science as a Human Endeavor’ strand can make hot topics teachable immediately by connecting science to lived relevance without crowding the syllabus.  

Geoff Masters then mapped how international frameworks shape domestic curricula, pointing to the long shift from memorisation toward transferable capabilities and to assessment reforms like PISA that emphasise applying learning in real contexts. His key point was that reform works best when education is treated as a learning system where the curriculum, teacher development, assessment and reporting all align. 

Discussion 2: GAVI’s next chapter: equity, innovation, and global health security

A dive into the pressures reshaping global vaccination, from disrupted financing to rising distrust, and what it will take to safeguard confidence, equity, and the preventive power that keeps infections, and antibiotic use, down.  

The discussion opened with reference to HIV management in NZ as a practical playbook for coalition-building and rapid response to managing infectious disease, arguing that the fastest gains came when affected communities were engaged early and structural barriers to prevention were removed. This included legal reform (decriminalising specific behaviours), public needle exchanges, and service access framed as public health tools. Vaccination became the concrete bridge between prevention and AMR.  

In Gavi’s decisions about which vaccines to invest in, impact on AMR reduction is one criterion, recognising that preventing infections through immunisation and other basic public‑health measures reduces antibiotic use and the selective pressure that drives resistance. 

The conversation covered the financing cliff now shaping global health. This includes replenishment gaps, donor pullbacks, and the downstream consequence, which is hard choices for countries whose allocations are cut sharply as funding falls short.  

The exchange then moved toward practical political craft that included advice to communicate simply, frame issues in terms that decisionmakers recognise, and keep the door open so timing can work in your favour. The segment ended with a reminder that AMR progress will be judged in clinics and communities, not at policy tables.  

Panel – Power, people and pathogens: Rewriting health advocacy for a distrustful world.

Shifting political winds and competing narratives are redefining how public health messages land. This panel explored how the AMR community can adapt its messages and methods to win attention, build trust, and drive real behaviour change among both leaders and communities. This includes a need for alliances across government, civil society, faith groups, and digital influencers to forge a shared narrative that makes action on AMR urgent, relevant and impossible to ignore. 

Summary 

This closing panel focussed on how change happens, treating advocacy as infrastructure, translating evidence into political decisions, and political decisions into delivery.  

Advocacy in action 

Building on the foundation of the discussions about GAVI and the role of vaccines in infectious disease prevention, panellists confronted today’s more difficult operating environment, marked by misinformation, populism, anti-science sentiment and deepening distrust. The panel argued that evidence-based policy is more than data; it requires synthesis, credible advice, and communication that can survive social media distortion. This was linked directly to prevention: when trust erodes, routine immunisation coverage falls, preventable disease returns, and avoidable infection pressure increases antibiotic demand, which is exactly the upstream dynamic that accelerates resistance. 

The conversation then widened from leadership at the top to delivery at the edges. A central point was that advocacy must be multilevel because, in decentralised government systems, subnational decision makers are not secondary audiences. They may have limited access to donor agencies and global institutions, but they have direct access to people, and that access is essential.  

The panel argued that policy considerations need to be built in from the start of any AMR initiative, not added later once a project is already shaped. In decentralised government systems, advocacy also has to fit delivery constraints: what can be funded, what can be delivered with existing capacity, and what will be workable under tight budgets and operational limits. The emphasis was on using evidence that is recognisable and credible to those affected because it reflects lived experience and practical consequences. 

A cross-portfolio lens reinforced that complex issues only scale when coalitions extend beyond a single ministerial silo. Drawing on lessons from other crosscutting domains, the panel argued for finding a clear ‘relevance hook’ that nonspecialists care about and then building alignment across portfolios that do not naturally coordinate. This also surfaced a capability gap. Technical experts are trained deeply within disciplines, but are often less prepared to navigate the economics, governance, and political processes that determine whether evidence translates into action. Practical pathways that connect experts with parliamentary and policy processes were presented as essential for strengthening that translation. 

Finally, the panel returned to political reality, which is that technical evidence needs to be translated into the language of decisions through short policy briefs that set out feasible options, consequences and implementable next steps. It also means framing proposals in terms that relate to constituents and delivery, and tailoring messages for specific settings, including through local languages and trusted institutions.  

The shared conclusion was that AMR advocacy needs the same discipline as programme delivery and requires clear framing, trusted messengers, routes to action at multiple levels, and sustained public engagement so that the next surge of political attention produces implementation rather than another cycle of reports. 

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