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Different Contexts, Common Aspirations: Building Spaces for Youth Participation

Young people are often described as the leaders of tomorrow, yet they are still underrepresented in the rooms where decisions that affect their lives are made.

Across Nigeria and the wider region, young people experience climate and development challenges differently, but many of their concerns are similar. Water insecurity, food and energy challenges, extreme heat, flooding and limited economic opportunities affect communities in different ways. Young people are also organising around these issues, developing ideas and demanding better responses.

For the Youth Climate Collective (YCC), youth participation is about creating opportunities for young people to define priorities, develop positions, engage decision-makers and contribute to the policies and solutions that affect them.

How YCC has built spaces for youth Participation

Our work at YCC focuses on creating practical ways for young people to participate in climate and development conversations.

Through the Negotiation Café, young people build an understanding of climate negotiations, the actors involved and how decisions are shaped within international climate processes. You can read the report and  insights from the first Negotiation Café here.

The Futures Lab creates space for young people to examine climate and development challenges, test ideas and think through possible policy and community responses.

Under the Futures Lab, we hosted the Climate Patch Series 1 and 2 centered around youth-led climate innovation and finance. The insights from this series were formalised into Powering Youth Finance Instruments: A Toolkit for More Inclusive Climate Finance.

Through campaigns and advocacy, we connect youth concerns with specific issues and policy demands including conversations around international convenings such as the #Drivethefuturecampaign,  the AU Summit, and Santa Marta Conference on Just Transition. And through platforms such as the Climate Nexus Podcast, we create space for young people to amplify the impact of their work around environmental and development issues.

These activities serve different purposes, but they are connected by the same objective: to make youth participation practical and consequential.

Participation that Shapes Policy

Participation is most useful when young people's contributions can move beyond discussion and inform wider conversations, advocacy and policy. This is reflected in our work on youth-led policy positions and manifestos. A manifesto provides a way to organise individual experiences and priorities into a collective position that can be used for advocacy and engagement.

The Youth Manifesto on Climate Change brought together priorities identified by young Nigerians across issues including water, agriculture and food security, energy, transportation, health, waste, adaptation, climate education, climate finance and governance.

This year, YCC is co-creating, in collaboration with the Strategic Youth Network for Development (SYND Ghana), a Youth Manifesto on Water Sovereignty.

The process brings together perspectives from young people, communities, civil society organisations and other stakeholders across the region. While water challenges differ across contexts, the process is helping identify common concerns and priorities that can inform wider discussions and advocacy on water governance.

The aim is to create a shared platform for youth perspectives on water that reflects different local realities while identifying common concerns and priorities across the region.

Sustaining Youth Participation

International Youth Day is an opportunity to recognise the work young people are already doing, but participation cannot be limited to one day.

At YCC, our focus is therefore not simply on creating more opportunities for young people to speak. It is on creating spaces where their priorities can be developed, connected to wider conversations and taken into decision-making processes.

The issues may differ across communities and countries. The realities may not be the same. But across these contexts, young people continue to express common aspirations for more responsive institutions, better public services, sustainable livelihoods and a greater role in decisions that affect their lives.

Our role is to continue building the spaces through which those aspirations can be articulated, connected and taken forward.