by Louisa Nora Mammeri, Beniam Gebrezghi, and Suvimali Suraweera
UNDP’s Youth Empowerment Portfolio in Asia and the Pacific (YEP-AP) has partnered with the Regional Innovation Team to co-host a Community of Practice for youth portfolio designers. This article shares key learnings and emerging opportunities in youth development programming, including Youth Co:Lab, which focuses on youth-led initiatives that empower young people to actively shape political and economic agendas rather than as passive participants. It also explores ways to expand youth programming by incorporating, for example, intergenerational dialogues, diaspora engagement, and care work reforms, offering a more inclusive approach to addressing the complex challenges youth face today.
The challenges young people are facing are complex in their socio-economic, political, and cultural dimensions. Often, our programming falls short of coherently addressing these challenges because it does not systematically align with their needs and aspirations.
To address these challenges, we have initiated a Community of Practice with the Youth Co:Lab, an initiative co-led by UNDP and Citi Foundation.
As this initiative took off, together with youth and country office colleagues, we quickly realized that:
Young people want to be in the driving seat to influence and co-implement programmatic priorities, and not just be at the “receiving end”;
They want more institutionalized ways to engage, shape their futures, and influence policies, focusing on structural issues (e.g. unpaid care work). While skills development work is appreciated, the end goal should arrive at structural levels, which has proven elusive.
Intergenerational work, often seen as peripheral, is essential to accelerate youth participation. It tackles relational and hierarchical dynamics that limit agency and thereby opens opportunities for deeper, more equitable collaboration between youth and older generations.
Lastly, with cross-country mobility at its high, engaging the diaspora is critical for keeping young people connected with their homelands, both socially and economically, and could potentially transform brain drain into additional development momentum.
In what follows, we dive deeper into our ongoing work with the ambition to reframe and enrich our portfolios, illustrating their close linkage to such “development mainstays” as inclusive economic growth or governance.
Making space for young people’s political and economic agency
Across all youth portfolios, a clear message emerged: young people should not be reduced to “participants” or “beneficiaries” of development programs. Instead, we need to change how we operate and ensure they have actual agency in shaping political and economic decisions.
In Cambodia, the lack of spaces or platforms for civic engagement, particularly for rural, indigenous youth, and young people with disabilities, narrow their ability to engage in policy discussions. Moreover, many women and girls, who perform most of the unpaid care and domestic work, face barriers to economic opportunities. Hence, youth portfolio practitioners are exploring ways to transform Cambodia’s care economy through investments in services, infrastructure, and parental leave policies. These interventions aim to create the environment and resources for young people, including women and girls, to influence structural decisions.
Shifting power to shape future-oriented policies
The global youth momentum is loud and clear; our role must be to support and amplify it. From Asia to Africa, young people are already taking matters into their own hands by creating new spaces and testing innovative tactics that challenge conventional views on politics and civic engagement. As highlighted in the article “Yielding Power to Youth”, there is a call for a real shift in power dynamics and genuine integration of young people’s perspectives into decision-making processes.
Cognizant of these demands, youth portfolio designers in Vietnam are also moving beyond traditional development approaches. They conducted participatory research with adolescents to explore the future of work, seeking to understand what the future of employers and labor policies might entail. Key questions include what types of organizations young people will work for; where future generations will pay taxes, and what their social protection will look like. In addition to this research, the team also launched a pilot activity (“Empower Her Tech”) to improve young women entrepreneurs’ digital skills in future work environments and further unpack the digital skills gap. By exploring the needs of today’s youth and future generations, programme practitioners hope to inform future-oriented, anticipatory policies that align with young people’s structural demands in the economy and political space.
Centering youth is generational work
Agency and generational dynamics are intrinsically linked. Like in Cambodia and Vietnam, colleagues in Laos are observing restrictive social norms and a lack of platforms for young people to have their voices heard. Thus, one piece of their portfolio is looking to study relational and intergenerational dynamics. Social hierarchies between younger and older people were observed in different scenarios and fixated expectations have widened the gap between generations. Young people feel that their participation and agency in shaping decisions is confined — hence frustrations mount while trust decreases. Laos colleagues recalled the concept of Sapa Cafes where mostly elderly men enjoy coffee with condensed milk and discuss social as well as political issues. The concept of Sapa Cafe has inspired them to seek to dissect the ingredients of what makes a Sapa cafe “safe” for discussions and whether it could foster intergenerational dialogue [1].
In Sri Lanka, the team echoed that youth work needs to be a cross-generational effort, especially in the post-war context. Their portfolio will explore interventions that facilitate a shift away from mindsets that pressure young people into traditional expectations of what decent work and meaningful jobs should look like. In their portfolio research, the team picked up that the pressure of traditional mental models leads to a sense of hopelessness among young people. Late Vinya Ariyaratne, the president of Sri Lanka’s largest community development organization, fittingly stated: “the policy makers do not recognize it. They say, ‘No, we don’t have trauma. We just need to create jobs.’ Since our historical trauma has not been acknowledged, people have to deal with it in their own private way.” Instead of focusing on increasing the number of people in employment only, a generational lens opens the scope towards communal well-being and renewed social norms.
These examples suggest that intergenerational contact zones can not only serve as venues for difficult conversations on historical wounds but also as spaces where actors can safely engage, play, and deliberate on complex issues like social security, the future of work, and the trade-offs between growth and climate.
Engaging the diaspora to move from brain drain to brain gain
Another question that came up is: How can we be locally rooted but globally connected when many young people move away from their homelands? In Bhutan, portfolio designers are redefining the issue of brain drain by focusing on keeping the diaspora connected with their country. Practical initiatives in the pipeline include the creation of the CivicPay platform, which is an inclusive payment system for Bhutanese citizens abroad. It aims to ensure safe and transparent financial transactions that link contributions of the Bhutanese diaspora directly to national development projects. This complements the Digital Diaspora Bonds platform that encourages the Bhutanese diaspora to invest in sustainable development projects such as renewable energy, making it simpler to contribute to the country’s green economy and keep up a strong connection to back home. Furthermore, the NomadPay gateway supports digital nomads and gig workers, most of whom are young, in making financial management easier regardless of their location. Finally, these technical solutions are complemented with a range of cultural programming for the International Youth Day celebrations, giving center stage to young Bhutanese both within the country and abroad. These efforts not only maintain cross-border connections but also remove barriers of circular migration, as many Bhutanese youth who go to Australia, for example, eventually return, bringing back valuable skills and experiences.
These learnings from Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka and Vietnam inspire us to rethink youth programming. It cannot stop at skills training for job creation. It must engage more with systemic barriers and seek to co-design relational, civic spaces in which young people can shape future policies and economies. Young people’s aspirations cannot be curtailed, including their desire to move out of their country and possibly return or engage otherwise. Their realities are dynamic, and our role as programme designers is to do the best we can to steward their aspirations in a setting in which they are in the driving seat.
Footnotes
[1] Some existing literature on “Intergenerational Contact Zones” suggests that well designed relational spaces could help unpack generational gaps and develop strategies to narrow them.
This article was originally published by UNDP Strategic Innovation.
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