For years, young people have been lauded as “the leaders of tomorrow.” But what if we looked more closely at the assumption hidden within those words? Tomorrow is always postponed, and young people are consistently invited to conferences, asked for their opinions, encouraged to share their ideas and praised for their passion, while the actual decisions are often made elsewhere. We are told that we are stakeholders, that we are future leaders and that we are the generation that will inherit the planet. But we are not simply waiting to inherit the world. We are living in it, already experiencing its failures and successes, its environmental crises and technological disruptions. More importantly, we are capable of doing something about them. Young people should not be treated simply as stakeholders in problems created by the world around us, but empowered to become problem solvers themselves.

Being a stakeholder means having something at stake. Being a problem solver means accepting responsibility for change. The difference is profound. A young person may be deeply concerned about pollution, climate change, education, unemployment or inequality, but concern alone does not change a situation. What changes situations is the ability to ask difficult questions, understand the causes of a problem, experiment with solutions and take responsibility for the results. This does not mean that every young person has to single-handedly solve a global crisis. It means that young people should be given opportunities to move beyond discussion and into meaningful action.

One of the most powerful recent examples has come from Madhya Pradesh, where Surendra Singh Choudhary, popularly known as Bittu Tabahi, a young man from Biaora, drew widespread attention after taking action against the pollution of the Ajnar River. Rather than simply complaining about the condition of the river or waiting for someone else to act, he began working to remove accumulated waste from it. His initiative, which began around Republic Day, eventually attracted widespread public attention and support, and even caught the attention of Boyan Slat, founder of The Ocean Cleanup, who offered him an opportunity to work with the organisation. The significance of Bittu’s story is not merely that one young person began cleaning a polluted river. It is that he looked at a problem in front of him and decided that waiting was not the only possible response. His story demonstrates something important: sometimes the first step towards solving a problem is simply refusing to accept that it is someone else’s responsibility.

This spirit of initiative can also be seen in the work of Ridhima Pandey, an Indian environmental activist who began raising her voice about climate change at a remarkably young age. After experiencing the effects of the 2013 Kedarnath floods, she became involved in climate activism and, at the age of nine, filed a petition concerning climate change. Later, she joined other young climate activists in bringing international attention to the issue. Her contribution demonstrates another form of problem-solving: not every problem is solved by physically building something or cleaning something. Some problems require people who are willing to question institutions, demand accountability and force society to confront issues it would rather postpone. Young people can contribute through activism, research, technology, entrepreneurship, community work, public policy and countless other forms of action.

Youth-led action can take many different forms beyond India as well. Consider the example of Boyan Slat, the Dutch inventor and environmental entrepreneur who began working on the problem of ocean plastic as a teenager and went on to establish The Ocean Cleanup. His approach was not simply to complain about plastic pollution, but to ask a different question: could technology be designed to remove plastic from the environment at scale? That shift from “this is a terrible problem” to “how can we engineer a solution?” represents exactly the mindset that young people should be encouraged to develop. Problems become opportunities for investigation. Constraints become engineering questions. Failure becomes information. An idea becomes meaningful when someone is willing to test it.

This is why education itself needs to change. Young people are often taught to find the correct answer to a question that has already been written for them. But the real world rarely provides questions with four neatly arranged options and one answer hiding behind a page number. Climate change does not come with an answer key, nor do poverty, waste management, public transportation, water scarcity, cybersecurity or sustainable development. The ability to solve real problems requires curiosity, critical thinking, collaboration, creativity and the courage to experiment. Education should therefore not only prepare young people to pass examinations, but also prepare them to recognise problems that deserve to be solved.

Technology makes this opportunity even greater. A young person with a laptop and an internet connection can learn programming, analyse data, design an application, build a prototype, collaborate with people across the world or develop a solution to a problem in their own community. Artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology and renewable energy are transforming what individuals can create. But technology itself is not the solution. The important question is what we choose to do with it. Giving young people powerful tools without teaching them responsibility would merely create more powerful versions of old problems. Young innovators need not only technical knowledge, but also ethics, empathy and an understanding of the social consequences of their decisions.

The same principle applies to governance. Young people should not merely be invited to participate in symbolic consultations where their ideas are collected and quietly forgotten. If governments and institutions genuinely want youth participation, young people should be given opportunities to work alongside policymakers, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and community leaders. They should be able to propose solutions, test pilot projects, measure results and learn from failure. Participation becomes meaningful when it includes responsibility.

Businesses and investors also have a role to play. Young people often have ideas but lack resources, mentorship and access to networks. A brilliant solution can remain nothing more than a notebook sketch if its creator has no opportunity to develop it. Investment in young people should therefore not be viewed only as charity or corporate social responsibility, but as an investment in innovation itself. Young people bring fresh perspectives precisely because they have not always learned to accept existing systems as inevitable. Sometimes, that lack of familiarity with “the way things have always been done” is exactly what allows someone to imagine a better way.

However, empowering young people does not mean romanticising youth or pretending that every young idea is automatically brilliant. Young people can make mistakes. Adults can make mistakes too, and humanity has demonstrated that with impressive consistency. The goal should not be to replace experience with youth, but to combine them. Young people bring curiosity, adaptability and new perspectives. Older generations bring experience, institutional knowledge and lessons learned from previous failures. When these strengths work together, innovation becomes more powerful. Mentorship should therefore not mean telling young people what to think, but helping them learn how to think, question, test and improve.

Most importantly, young people need to be given permission to begin small. A person does not need to solve climate change before they are considered useful. They can start by improving waste management in a neighbourhood, developing a water-saving system, tutoring students, creating an accessibility tool, researching a local environmental problem or building a small piece of technology. The scale of the first action does not determine the scale of its eventual impact. Many significant movements begin with someone noticing something that everyone else has learned to ignore.

The greater danger is that young people will become convinced that solving problems is someone else’s job. If young people are told to wait until they are older, more qualified, more experienced or more powerful, society may unintentionally train an entire generation to become spectators. We should teach them that expertise can be developed, experience can be gained and solutions can be improved through action. A young person does not need to know everything before asking a good question. They need the courage to ask it and the discipline to search for an answer.

Young people should therefore be given three things: trust, tools and responsibility. Trust to believe that their ideas deserve serious consideration. Tools to turn those ideas into experiments and solutions. Responsibility to understand that changing the world is not merely about demanding change from everyone else. It also means being willing to contribute, measure consequences, learn from failure and keep improving.

The world does not need another generation that is merely good at describing its problems. It needs people who can look at a polluted river and imagine it clean, look at a broken system and ask how it could work better, and look at an impossible challenge and begin investigating anyway. It needs young people who do not wait for permission to become curious, who do not mistake age for authority, and who understand that leadership is not a title but a willingness to take responsibility.

So perhaps we should stop telling young people that they are merely “the leaders of tomorrow.” Perhaps we should ask something more demanding and more respectful: What problem can you help solve today? Give young people the knowledge to understand the problem, the mentors to guide them, the resources to experiment, the freedom to question and the responsibility to act. Do not promise us a seat at the table someday. Give us a place in the workshop today. We do not need to be handed a perfect world when our turn arrives. We need the opportunity to help build a better one while it is still being built. Because young people are not simply waiting for the future to happen to them. We are already living in the world that previous generations built, and we are already building the world that generations after us will inherit. The question is not whether young people belong in the future, but whether we will have the courage, trust and opportunity to help create it.