Amanda Namayi

Reflecting on the just concluded #AFSForum2024 gave me a deeper appreciation on the value of striking while the iron is hot.

This year carried a particular significance for me, a full circle moment that arrived quietly. After three years of being on the convener’s side, organizing the very rooms other people would eventually walk into, I found myself on the other side of that arrangement, attending as a delegate. The corridors still buzzed the way I remembered them buzzing. Agripreneurs still filled the exhibition booths with their effervescent energy and the conference rooms still erupted with applause at perfectly curated moments. All of it was familiar, and yet none of it felt the same, because the vantage point changes everything about what a conference actually means.

At the Youth Dome, where the youth focused activities took place, that shift became especially clear. I have spent years advocating for youth inclusion in these spaces, pushing for seats at tables that were not always eager to make room. Watching that inclusion take shape from within it, rather than campaigning for it from a podium, was its own kind of special.

The panels matter, certainly, and the plenaries set the tone for the week. The actual work, though, the part that is life altering and career defining, happens behind closed doors. It happens in the bilateral meetings that quietly secure the next big milestone, long before anyone announces it publicly. It happens over coffee on the sidelines, in conversations that were never listed on any official agenda but somehow matter more than most of what was. It happens in the dinners curated for a handful of people, conversations that exist precisely because someone decided you were worth including in them. I had the honour of one such tête-à-tête with Ambassador Hans Hoogeveen of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, a conversation that reminded me how much of this work depends on relationships built one deliberate exchange at a time, rather than one keynote speech.

Conferences “could” be seen as a waste of time for some; but what’s in it for you? What’s YOUR agenda from the whole?

Be strategic.

It would be easy for someone unfamiliar with these spaces to look at a conference and see an elaborate waste of time, an expensive gathering of people repeating familiar talking points to each other. I understand that scepticism, and I do not think it is entirely unfounded. Plenty of forums produce more photographs than outcomes. The difference, in my experience, lies almost entirely in the question each delegate is willing to ask themselves before they ever board the plane: what is actually in this for me, and what is my agenda for being here at all. Walking into a room without an answer to that question is how people leave forums with a folder of glossy brochures and nothing that moves their work forward.

Here’s an ‘insider’ tip for you, the real substance of a forum like this rarely happens where the cameras are pointed. Being strategic about a conference does not mean treating every conversation as transactional or reducing every relationship to its usefulness. It means recognizing that these gatherings compress months of potential networking, learning, and positioning into a handful of days, and that the sun does not stay up indefinitely. The delegate who identifies their priorities in advance, who knows which three people they need to speak with and which one commitment they need to leave with, tends to walk away with far more than the delegate who simply attends and hopes something useful happens to them.

Keep showing up with intention, identifying your own sweet spot in every room you enter, and to make that hay while the sun shines.

Amanda Namayi