Meghan Markle has said that a conversation about gender equality and female empowerment “can’t happen without men”.
The Duchess of Sussex met with youth ambassadors from One Young World at Windsor Castle on Friday morning for a roundtable discussion on initiatives to improve gender equality. She was joined by her husband, Prince Harry, who arrived as a surprise to the delegates.
Beginning the discussion, Meghan told the group that One Young World – a global forum of young leaders dedicated to finding solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges – has been “very important” to her for several years.
“Our intention today is to try to create somewhat of a task force to see what we can do within our communities and then use that knowledge to apply it to whatever is happening in all these other communities,” she said.
“In terms of gender equality, which is something I have championed for a long time, I think that conversation can’t happen without men being a part of it. So for this reason it made complete sense to let him [Harry] join today. So thank you for letting him crash the party.”
The roundtable was led by Queen’s Commonwealth Trust chief executive Nicola Brentnall and moderated by One Young World counsellors, social media influencer Rossana Bee and Canada’s first openly gay Olympic gold medallist Mark Tewksbury.
Harry and Meghan heard from the founder of the south African organisation, Motholung Network Against Women and Child Abuse, Lebogang Bogopane, about her personal experiences of familial domestic violence.
“I got married very young and experienced domestic violence,” Bogopane said. “My mother is a survivor and I’m also a survivor. One day I said ‘I’m tired, this needs to stop’.”
She told the duchess about her project, Bake for Hope, which provides locally baked bread – something she said is still a luxury in certain parts of South Africa.
The roundtable is the couple’s first public engagement since their television documentary, in which they described the struggles of the past year. In the programme – Harry & Meghan: An African Journey – Meghan admitted feeling vulnerable and spoke of the difficulty in coping with intense tabloid interest, saying: “It’s not enough to just survive something, that’s not the point of life. You have got to thrive.”
The duke also spoke of the pressure he felt trying to protect his family from unwanted media attention.
Meghan is a long-standing supporter of One Young World, which she called “the best think tank imaginable”. The One Young World Summit is a four-day global forum for young leaders, which aims to bring together 2,000 young people from more than 190 countries to accelerate social impact. On Tuesday, Meghan attended the summit’s opening ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London.