Youth Peacebuilders Are Critical Stakeholders

Many international organizations and critical national and international actors have agreed that investing in youth is not simply “doing youth a favor.” Youth leaders and peacebuilders worldwide, including in Africa, Latin America and Asia, are already providing renewed hope for change — and they are keen on partnering with the U.N. and others to achieve shared visions for the future. As Kessy Martine Ekomo-Soignet, a young woman peacebuilder from Central African Republic, told the U.N. Security Council: “We are there with you to build the peace that we all want to see.”

Many young people are working tirelessly to end violence by reshaping the very definition of peacebuilding, helping to build strong institutions and to implement lasting solutions to reduce violence, deliver justice, combat corruption and ensure meaningful participation in their communities.

And they’ve quickly learned to work with one another in service of their missions. The SDGs Network, a youth-led coalition of youth-serving civil society organizations, focuses on implementing the SDGs in their countries. The network leverages the work of academia, civil society, corporate organizations and government to provide resources to enable young people to lead change. In Nigeria alone, the network boasts more than 350 organizations, with 72 youth champions who work with 3,700 volunteers across the country to participate in the Nigeria development agenda.

There are hundreds of youth-led groups making a difference — from the Peace Brigade in Sri Lanka to Defyhatenow’s work to stop hate speech, misinformation, human rights violations and the incitement of violence in South Sudan, Cameroon, Ethiopia and Sudan. So, the question is: How do we rethink our engagement with youth so we are able to support them better in  leading change?

How can we support youth leaders to accelerate change towards Sustainable Development Goals?

Despite the impact and reach of youth leadership in peacebuilding, "adequate attention is not paid to the constructive roles young people play in crisis and conflict situations," said Saji Prelis, co-chair of the Global Coalition on Youth, Peace and Security.

Joshua Alade, executive director of the Nigeria Youth SDGs Network, wrote in his prologue for an SDG playbook, "We believe that the right support for youth will enable them to hold their government accountable towards ensuring we end poverty, attain decent work and education as well as good health and winning the battle against climate change."

Knowing that youth leadership can bring the golden goose home when it comes to the SDGs should provide motivation for the international community, national governments and private businesses to support youth efforts — with four key priorities:

1. Creating an environment for youth to be at the center of decision-making spaces.

It is urgent to go beyond talking about amplifying youth voices and turn it into tangible action. Governments and leaders must go beyond signing symbolic resolutions to include young people within their national or organizational agendas. These symbolic measures must then give way to meaningful partnerships with young peacebuilders to advance SDG 16.

When done correctly, having youth at the center of decision-making spaces can have a dramatic impact. Red Uva, an anti-corruption network created by 10 young university students in Colombia, partnered with the Office of the National Comptroller and the Ministry of Education to identify and highlight issues of corruption. Together, they created and implemented a plan to train young students to monitor transparency in the National School Feeding Program (PAE) and now have direct contact with the comptroller's office to report any irregularities.

Besides partnering directly with youth-led organizations, it is important to create spaces where the work of young people is recognized, as this fosters collaboration and trust among young people and institutions working to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. In Northern Ireland, an event was organized this past September called Brighter Days Ahead, which "celebrates the efforts of young people in their everyday lives to break down barriers, unite communities and act as a catalyst for peacebuilding.”

2. Developing tools and approaches based on youth needs that focus on strengthening the capacity of youth leaders to manage conflict in their communities.

USIP’s Generation Change Fellows Program was created based on the needs expressed by young people. The program aims to strengthen young leaders’ capacity to create positive social change in their communities through peer-to-peer engagement, where they learn and mentor one another. This community of young peacebuilders can help counter the isolation felt by youth leaders and increase the resilience needed for working in conflict-affected places.

Fellows have expressed the program has been pathbreaking for them, as it provides the peacebuilding tools they were missing to advance their work. Programs that support young leaders can have a multiplier effect — by investing in young leaders' capacities, they can pass their own learnings on to their communities. One Generation Change Fellow, Ndugwa Hassan, founded the Ugandan Muslim Youth Development Forum (UMYDF) after experiencing the negative effects of violent extremism firsthand. Hassan’s organization has provided employment skills training to more than 600 vulnerable young people to prevent recruitment by extremist and criminal groups — and UMYDF’s programming on peaceful coexistence draws on his Generation Change experience as well as the training curriculum.

3. Devoting more resources to youth-led and youth-owned peacebuilding initiatives.

As aptly put by the Global Changemakers program: "Young people are the key to success for the Sustainable Development Goals, yet donor funding rarely goes to young people and youth-led projects.” Half of youth-led organizations operate with under $5,000 per year, and only 11 percent operate with over $100,000. Rather than duplicating projects, we need more programs that diversify the recipients of funding. More investment needs to be made in youth-led organizations supporting SDG 16 like Pasos Libres (Free Steps), which uses technology and innovative methodologies to address human trafficking, or Youth for Peace International, an Indian organization that provides theoretical and experiential learning aimed at strengthening the capacity of young people to engage one another and their communities in recognizing and understanding the power of difference.

To go further, funders need to re-think who decides where the money goes and how their grant selection process operates. The Andrus Family Fund is changing the approach by not only bringing young people together to decide where the funding should go, but also building a completely different decision-making process made up of eight youth organizers — all of whom are directly impacted by the issues the foundation wants to address. This table was able to raise issues to make the fund more accessible and effective in a way that traditional decision-makers may have never thought.

4. Creating cross-sectoral networks to work in coordination with youth-led initiatives.

International organizations, government, academia and civil society need to work in coordination with youth-led organizations at both the national and international levels to boost efforts of one another's missions.

The aforementioned SDGs Network leverages the work of several actors to provide resources to enable young people to lead change. In the Philippines, the network became part of the U.N. COVID-19 taskforce and collaborated with IBM to deliver fast COVID-19 information by using IBM Watson Assistant, increasing consultations by 1,050 percent. This cross-collaboration leveraged each group’s strengths to manage COVID-19 in the country. As young people advance on the long road to achieving SDG 16, government institutions and organizations need to make major changes in their systems, structures and decision-making spaces to allow youth-led efforts to thrive, as they can help promote stability, peace and security.

Gbenga Oni is a program officer with USIP’s curriculum and training design team.