Youth Take Lead in COVID-19 Recovery

The Africa Youth Partnership’s work on COVID-19 focuses a youth-led, equitable recovery. We are engaging, supporting and empowering young people to put their ideas into action and to play a leading role in the recovery. Through this work, we are engendering increased attention to and investment in addressing the critical issues of social and economic inequality that have been escalated by the COVID-19 pandemic. If duty bearers and stakeholders at local, national and continental levels act decisively in response to young people’s voices and engagement, the African recovery agenda will become more inclusive and equitable.

Together with our partners, we have been escalating youth action for an equitable recovery across Africa, starting with ten pilot countries, namely Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In these countries, we have been pursuing a three-prong mission to:

1. Improve the capacities and skills of youth-led organisations and young innovators to develop and implement policy accountability frameworks and offer solutions, enabling them to better connect, collaborate and self-organise towards evidence-based advocacy for an equitable pandemic response and recovery on the continent;
2. Support youth-led organisations and young innovators to produce collective reviews and evidence of the performance of national and regional COVID-19 recovery programmes and to offer their own solutions; and
3. Amplify youth voices in policy spaces to influence national and regional policies, programmes and budgets in favour of more equitable and inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.