For the last two years, I have been part of Harvard WorldMUN, a Harvard undergraduate group that runs the annual World Model United Nations conference—the world’s most internationally diverse Model UN conference. Featuring delegates from 110+ countries in a different city every March, WorldMUN aims to expand intellectual horizons while maintaining its core mission of increasing cross-cultural communication and understanding to instill a sense of global citizenship in participants. In terms of sheer numbers though, representation tends to be skewed toward wealthier and more experienced university delegations, particularly from Europe, the Americas, and Australia. To address this, I have been working along with the rest of the executive organizing team (Secretariat) to provide outreach, recruitment, and information about our team’s increasingly focused initiatives on financial aid and introductory training to underrepresented regions and university delegations. In particular, I have focused on South Asia and Southeast Asia, given my background in these regions/cultures, by reaching out to friends, professors, and college students with resources and informal training. I’ve taken special effort to conduct outreach to universities without a MUN footprint, in the hopes that by WorldMUN 2020, we will see tangible representational impacts in previously unexposed delegations and regions.

There are three major geographical regions from which we see significantly lower representation at conference—Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania. Larger universities in the first two tend to have active delegations or MUN societies, whereas Oceania lacks many large MUN delegations active in international competition. I aim to evaluate impact via this project in terms of different measures for these two categories. For each of Africa and South/Southeast Asia, I intend to recruit at least 2 new delegations and/or 20 individual delegates from each region for WorldMUN 2020. Depending on where the conference will end up taking place (which will be determined by May 2019), we may expand our goal to more delegations/delegates (for example, if conference were determined to take place close to one of these regions, thereby making it easier for delegations from that region to attend). Moreover, I aim to develop relationships with students at least 2 universities without active MUN delegations in each region in the hopes of encouraging development of active competitive international relations societies and eventual representation at WorldMUN.

Of course, there are also potential delegates and delegations that face difficulty in coming to conference from more represented parts of the world, including Europe and the Americas. The goal here will be to add at least two delegations and/or 20 individual delegates from previously underrepresented countries/universities in these more historically represented regions.

Our financial aid budget each year is above 60,000 USD, but I think that we can improve our application and allocation process. In particular, we could do well to apportion off about 5,000-10,000 USD strictly for new delegations in need. We would also include prior experience in WorldMUN conferences as a factor for financial aid decisions, prioritizing in general first-time delegations in need in order to spur forward representation. Though such provisions have been discussed in the past, it has never been implemented as a result of uncertainty regarding number and need of new delegations. However, with a renewed and focused push to incorporate more new delegations, I believe such a move could help support and sustain new delegations that could become integrated into the WorldMUN spirit—and, by extension, the broader competitive international relations community.