The Caribbean's young members are already here

It is easy to talk about young people in politics as a future prospect. In the Caribbean, they are already being elected.

In 2025, Roshanna Trim, born in 1995, took a seat in the Senate of Barbados. The same year, Kareem Marcelle, also born in 1995, was elected to represent Laventille West in Trinidad and Tobago. They are not outliers; they are part of a steady shift that bodies like the Inter-Parliamentary Union have been tracking across the world.

Alongside elected members, the region has a growing infrastructure of youth-in-governance work, from the Caribbean regional youth parliament to national youth-parliament networks in the Eastern Caribbean.

What has been missing is a standing link between the young people who actually hold seats. That is the gap the Caribbean Young Parliamentarians Network is being built to fill: less a launch than a connection, drawing together members who are already, quietly, changing who the region’s parliaments look like.