Each year, Youth Day invites South Africa to reflect on the courage and political imagination of young people in the past and to reckon with the conditions that shape youth agency in the present. This year, that reflection also sits within a wider national conversation about who belongs, how people in communities relate to one another, whether basic services reach the people who need them, how migration is handled, and the strain of unemployment and inequality. These issues are complex and cannot be reduced to a single label. They remind us, however, that the challenges facing young Africans are deeply connected to the systems, institutions and political choices that shape everyday life across the continent.
It is worth recalling what Youth Day commemorates. On 16 June 1976, young people in Soweto organised, mobilised and confronted an apartheid system that denied them their dignity and their future. They did not wait for an invitation into political life. They knew their context intimately and understood with conviction that their knowledge carried authority. They acted on it. Their example reminds us that the future is often first imagined by those denied a voice in the present. It is this insistence on agency, in the face of exclusion, that continues to shape how we think about youth agency today.
Against this backdrop, the project, Youth Shaping Africa’s Present and Future: Insights from Youth Programming Across Africa, supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), speaks directly to this moment. Implemented through a consortium comprising SAIIA, Positive Agenda Advisory and Université Alassane Ouattara (UAO), the project brings together youth-focused organisations, researchers, practitioners and young leaders from across Africa to examine the systems that shape youth programming – the work organisations do with and for young people – and the conditions under which young people can have a real say in the decisions that affect them. These systems do not respect borders. Contending with them requires cross-continental collaboration and a commitment to African solidarity.
Through a series of Youth Programming Innovation Labs (YPILs), participants have explored a set of fundamental questions: Who holds power in youth development and planning? Whose knowledge counts? What assumptions are made about young people’s capacities? What prevents youth-led initiatives from shaping policy, funding priorities and institutional practice? And what would it take to move from youth participation as a principle to youth agency as a lived reality?
One of the clearest insights to emerge from the YPILs is that young people have both the desire and the capacity to set the agenda for their own development. What they often lack is the access and authority to turn their ideas into action.
At the same time, the labs highlighted an equally important reality: African youth are not a single, homogenous group. Young people navigate immensely different political, economic, cultural and social contexts across the continent. These differences are not barriers to collaborative work and action; they are what make meaningful collaboration possible. Moving beyond flattening representations of African youth and creating space for plurality enables programmes to better reflect the needs and aspirations of young people in different contexts.
As participants traced who holds power, who controls resources and how decisions get made in youth programming, a persistent gap between what is said and what is done about youth inclusion was revealed. While young people are increasingly invited into workshops and included in consultations, participation does not always translate into decision-making power, ownership or long-term influence. Too often, young people are asked to contribute to discussions without being given a genuine role in shaping the outcomes.
The challenge, therefore, is not to merely improve youth inclusion. It is also to rethink and reconstruct the structures, assumptions and relationships that determine where youth agency is enabled and where it is constrained. This means challenging the long-held belief that young people lack the experience to make crucial decisions, cannot manage complex responsibilities, or should be prepared for leadership only at some point in the future rather than trusted with meaningful authority in the present.
Young people and youth-focused organisations operate within wider systems shaped by funding cycles, policy and political priorities, institutional cultures, and socioeconomic inequalities that affect access to resources. Meaningful youth agency requires more than being included on paper. It requires deliberate shifts in how programmes are designed, how decisions are made, how resources are allocated and how accountability is shared.
In July, SAIIA will convene an in-person Youth Programming Innovation Lab in Nairobi, Kenya, bringing together selected participants from across the project’s regional engagements. The Nairobi lab will build on the inputs already gathered online from a diverse group of youth participants and youth development stakeholders, creating space for deeper reflection, peer learning and co-creation.
Participants will explore how the future of youth programming can move beyond token inclusion towards real influence and power. By applying futures thinking, the participants will discuss critically and think systematically about what it would take for young people to shape programmes, influence policy, inform funding priorities and drive innovation within their own contexts. The lab will explore the role of working across generations, where the experience of elders and the insight of the young strengthen each other rather than compete, and culminate in a policy dialogue bringing together project participants, youth programming practitioners, funders and policymakers. This dialogue will provide an opportunity to share emerging insights from the project and to broaden the conversation about how youth programming across Africa can become more responsive, more transformative and more accountable to young people themselves.
For SAIIA, this work is part of a broader commitment to rethinking the future of African youth to achieve systemic justice beyond. Youth programming is often framed around urgent needs such as employment, education, participation, skills development and livelihoods. These issues remain critical, but they must be connected to longer-term questions about power, systems change and the futures young people are already shaping. We should ask not only what youth programming is responding to today, but also what kinds of societies, institutions and relationships it is helping to create.
On Youth Day, this reflection is especially important. The legacy of 1976 is more than a remembrance of the past; it is a reminder that the future is always shaped by those willing to challenge the limits of the present. It challenges institutions, policymakers, funders and civil society to recognise young people as political, social and intellectual actors in the present.
If youth development and investment in Africa is to meet the scale of the moment, it must move beyond inviting young people into pre-designed spaces. It must support young people to shape those spaces themselves. It must recognise youth knowledge as central, make room for the diversity of experiences that constitute African youth, and create the conditions for shared ownership and meaningful authority.
The lessons emerging from the YPILs point in a clear direction: young people are not waiting to be empowered. They are already organising, building, questioning and imagining differently. The task is for the work organisations do with and for young people to catch up.
