In this its 52nd anniversary year the International Federation on Ageing (IFA) hosts the IFA – 17th Bi-annual Conference in Cape Town, South Africa from Sept. 9-12, 2025 just 90 days from now. The title this year is “Say YEBO to Action on Ageing”. Yebo, an informal South African word means Yes!
Calls for abstracts to present at the conference are well past the closing date and the full program is set to go with ten fundamental themes quite typically found in the IFA narrative.
Of these ten themes three stand out to me: Building capacity in lower-and middle-income countries, Connecting Ageing and the Economy & Family, Intergenerational Dynamics. And not surprisingly a lynchpin theme addresses United Nations Decade of Healthy Ageing (2021-2030) which the IFA has fully endorsed since its inception.
In light of recent developments, also of particular interest to the IFA, is the theme of Human Rights. For many years the IFA and other organizations have been proactive at the United Nations as a key participant since 2010 in the Open-Ended Working Group on Ageing in a quest to establish a UN Convention on this issue. Finally on April 3rd 2025 the UN Human Rights Council began the intergovernmental process to draft an international human rights treaty on older people.
With this theme in mind, one of the conference featured speakers is Claudia Mahler from Austria who is the UN Independent Expert on the human rights of older persons at the United Nations Human Rights Council. While the UN resolution is in place now, the work is not over and the next phase will involve a working group whose task will be, over a couple of years, to negotiate and draft, a legally binding document to enshrine the rights of older people into international law.
It is an understatement I know, to say that so much in the world has changed since I attended my first IFA Conference in August 2018 in Toronto. The scope of the dialogue on ageing and longevity matters back then of course had no whiff of what was to come with the impact of the 2020 pandemic. In fact the scheduled conference for 2020 had to shift dates twice arriving in November 2021 as a hybrid conference operating out of Niagara Falls. I chose the Virtual option.
With some former experience in the early 2000’s as a conference planner I know how much work goes into the effort and I give praise to the IFA team. But sadly I have to say that over these past few years, as a potential conference attendee, it has become more difficult and expensive to travel and participate on location, as with the 2023 Thailand conference. Without the Virtual option many people like me, far from South Africa in this case, will find it a challenge and give it a miss.
Yet even with rotating locations internationally, closer to home I find it almost a modern wonder that traditional models of conferences still work. Nonetheless people will want to confer in person and benefit from the social interaction, the sidebar conversations outside of breakout sessions and plenaries. That’s most often where the greatest learning happens – in that live exchange of ideas among a diverse range of professional practice areas.
As an IFA Associate Member I will be watching any of the social media feeds coming from the conference and look forward to some potential recordings or transcripts of the keynote speaker sessions. Perhaps as a suggestion, (nudge, nudge) the IFA team might consider inviting some of the speakers to present as a follow up on a Friday morning IFA Global Café on Zoom and further maybe have a select group of attendees present their conference take away messages too.
