The Asian Youth Forum (AYF) is a college-aged students and young people’s network organization founded in 1999 by Professor Kip Cates of Tottori University (Japan) together with the help of language educators and academic professionals who have been actively part of the Pan Asian Conference (PAC) and are members of international language (English) associations in the Asian region.

The idea of AYF is to bring together college and university students and young people from all over the Asian region to an international convention to meet with other youth and educators and provide them a venue where they could share their ideas, views and knowledge on culture, language, leadership, social and global issues especially those affecting the youth. Since its inception, AYF has been focused on the following objectives:

• Allow the participants to learn and understand each other’s basic language and to put emphasis on the use of the English language as an important (international) language and tool for communication in order to properly convey one’s ideas to another.
• Bring together the youth of Asia to an exchange opportunity to learn about each other’s culture, values, perceptions and history in order to bridge cultural gap and foster an environment of awareness, understanding and tolerance amidst differences.
• Provide a venue for the participants to freely discuss specific social and global issues that concern the youth in Asia today and understand how these affect them
• Provide the participants the opportunity and venue to plan for a solution which can be applied in their communities upon return home to resolve their chosen concern issue.
• Provide the participants training on leadership skills and help them prepare to become responsible global citizens and international leaders. 

Since then, the Asian Youth Forum has been organizing international summits for college-aged students and young people, which are held simultaneously with the Pan Asian Conference (PAC). AYF and PAC are organized and supported by the Language Teaching Associations in the Asian Region such as the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT), Thai TESOL, Far Eastern English Language Teachers' Association (FEELTA) and Bangladesh English Language Teachers Association (BELTA) to name a few.

Past AYF Summits have been held in South Korea (AYF1), Japan (AYF2), Taiwan (AYF3), Russia (AYF4), Thailand (AYF5), Japan (AYF6), Philippines (AYF7), South Korea (AYF8), Taiwan (AYF9), and just last year in Vladivostok, Russia (AYF10).