Introduction

Young people play a critical role in efforts for building and sustaining peace. A growing body of evidence demonstrates their importance as mediators, community mobilisers and advocates collaborating across borders to prevent conflict and maintain peace.³ Through these roles, they strengthen the reach and credibility of peacebuilding programmes within marginalised communities; mobilise powerful social change movements; and employ innovative, intersectional approaches to peacebuilding and conflict prevention. The adoption of three Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) resolutions by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is strong recognition of the important positive roles and intersectional approaches by which young people contribute to building and maintaining peace.⁴ As such, the resolutions place meaningful participation and inclusion of young people at the front and centre of peace and security.⁵ UNSC Resolution 2250 also urges Member States to increase ‘their political, financial, technical and logistical support [for] the needs and participation of youth in peace efforts’.⁶

Additionally, the UN General Assembly adopted the Financing for Peacebuilding Resolution in 2022, which recognises the persistent challenges young people face in accessing resources. Specifically, it calls for ‘efforts to address existing financing gaps for youth-led initiatives and youth organisations to ensure the full, effective and meaningful participation of youth in the design, monitoring, and implementation of peacebuilding efforts at all levels, and encourages all financing stakeholders to increase coordination and collaboration with youth on financing national priorities’.⁷

The current global population count sets the number of youth aged 18–29 at more than 1.8 billion – the largest age group in the world.⁸ Moreover, youth often constitute most of the inhabitants in conflict-affected contexts.⁹ Ensuring that young people’s participation in peace efforts is coupled with sufficient resources is therefore crucial.

Renewed investment by Member States and other donors is necessary to ensure that the UN meets its commitments on engaging young people as equal partners in peacebuilding. Additionally, the allocation of existing funds within the UN system should be increasingly directed to YPS. Therefore, this article provides a brief analysis of the current state of financing for the YPS agenda, including youth-led peacebuilding, within the UN system, and outlines recommendations to strengthen these investments.

Where are we at?

Data on financing of the YPS agenda in the UN system

The funding landscape for YPS within the UN system is limited, concentrated in only a few funds, with very little support for youth-led efforts. While existing data is limited, Figure 1 gives an overview of several sources of investment, providing insight into YPS investments within the UN system. Altogether, the five funds included in the Secretary-General’s Peacebuilding Funding Dashboard allocated US$ 1.083 billion towards peacebuilding during the period 2015–2021.10 However, only 10.63% of these resources went towards youth empowerment and participation, with significant fluctuation from year to year.¹¹ Although there is no disaggregated data on how much of this percentage specifically went towards youth-led efforts, it is likely to be a very small proportion – a recent survey demonstrated that 49% of youth-led organisations operate on less than US$ 5,000 annually.¹²

Accessibility of UN’s funding mechanisms to youth-led organisations

Most of the existing financing modalities within the UN system incorporate stringent eligibility criteria and fiduciary requirements, as well as overburdensome application and reporting requirements. These requirements remain challenging for youth organisations, which usually lack the structures and capacity to access and report on the funds. Especially youth who are left behind are less likely to access funding.¹³

These young people are those who are the furthest left behind while they face added barriers to the social, political and economic opportunities enjoyed by their peers.¹⁴ This group includes young women and gender-diverse youth, rural youth, indigenous youth and young people with disabilities. Additionally, most of the funding available to youth-led organisations is project-based and short-term. This forces youth-led organisations to adapt to donor priorities rather than responding to the needs of their local context. It also undermines the sustainability of youth-led civil society, as the lack of predictable funding limits organisational growth.

In addition, conceptualisation and design processes for UN system programmes and strategies – including among UN agencies and funds – frequently lack meaningful engage-ment of diverse youth, which should be the starting point. At the country level, lack of financing for youth-inclusive consultation processes places a significant limitation on UN country teams’ efforts to meaningfully engage young people in programme and strategy design. This results in frequent mismatches between how available funding is allocated and the priorities raised by young people in peacebuilding contexts. Only 40% of UN entities have at least some resources allocated to meaningful youth engagement.¹⁵

There are positive examples within and outside the UN system that can guide future efforts to make funding more accessible and responsive to young people’s needs. As an example, the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund has adopted a model in which civil society organisations are integrated into the fund’s governing board and in-country steering committees.¹⁷ This allows for greater influence in defining priorities for the allocation of resources.

Outside the UN system, the use of participatory grant-making models engages young people in funding process design and decision-making. Results so far have demon-strated greater responsiveness to young people’s needs and consequential ownership. As an example, since 2020, the Global Resilience Fund has channelled over US$ 1 million in bilateral, multilateral and philanthropic funds to organisa-tions led by girls and young feminists. The fund has rapidly distributed resources based on the funding needs, priorities and perspectives identified by community-level actors.¹⁸

Data gap on financing the YPS agenda

One of the largest barriers to advancing financing of the YPS agenda is a lack of data. This limits analysis of the amount, quality and focus of funding allocated to supporting youth-led and youth-focused peacebuilding. However, existing data indicates that both youth-led and youth-focused peacebuilding are not sufficiently resourced.

To date, the UN system does not disaggregate collected data on financing peacebuilding based on age. This significantly limits the evidence base available for identifying the financing needs of youth-led community service organisations (CSOs). In order to ensure no one is left behind, there is a particular need to incorporate marginalised youth groups within future data collected by the UN system. Despite efforts by some UN entities to improve data disaggregation and tracking, more needs to be done to strengthen data disaggregation using a diverse youth lens.¹⁹

Improved data collection would not only allow informed policy, strategy and financing regarding the YPS agenda, it would also enable greater coordination and integration of YPS perspectives across the humanitarian, peace and development nexus. For example, adoption of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Gender Equality Marker has helped inform analysis, including an OECD paper that ‘provides guidance and actions derived from promising practices that can be taken to strengthen the role of gender equality within members’ nexus strategies’.²⁰