Working with Young People Towards a Resilient Future

Young people have the creativity, potential and ability to make change happen—for themselves, their communities and the planet. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has the opportunity to leverage the innovative perspectives and ideas of young leaders within the organization, while supporting rural youth to promote social change. The IFAD Youth Network (IYN) contributed to the World Food Forum Flagship event in October 2022, a platform to foster diverse, inclusive and youth-led discussions on how to build upon young people’s role in working for a sustainable and healthy planet for all.  

Tools from the Partnerships and Architecture modules of the UN Innovation Toolkit helped to strengthen the initiative and are crucial in defining a way forward to foster exchange between young rural people and IFAD. 

Seeking platforms for meaningful interaction with young people 

Young people are key players in IFAD-funded projects, yet the living realities of rural youth in the most underserved communities of the world, are often far away from the experiences of young professionals in international organizations, such as IFAD, and hence hard to reflect in project design and implementation. It is therefore important to keep listening and learning, to iterate when needed and to seek open exchange on eye-to-eye level, so that the voices of the most vulnerable groups are considered and their experiences, perspectives and proposals will be fully integrated in the work IFAD does. 

Sometimes it takes an occasion, a platform to get out of our daily routines and tools to guide our thinking and incentivize us to approach topics differently, to engage in real dialogue and to make sure that the voices of those at the forefront of sustainable development are listened to. For a group of IFAD colleagues in the IFAD Youth Network, the World Food Forum is such a platform, and the UN Innovation Toolkit provides the inspiration to do so. 

A group from the IFAD Youth Network started to brainstorm about how to strengthen the exchange between young rural people who are leading innovative initiatives to overcome challenges in rural communities, young professionals in international organizations and other youth interested in sustainable and healthy development. The World Food Forum Flagship Event, the annual event of the movement from global youth for global youth to accelerate youth action for food systems transformation, was the ideal platform for the first activities, where we fostered the involvement of rural young people by organizing a main stage event, two side events and by sending a youth delegation, all to include perspectives, ideas and proposals from rural young people into the discussions and formulation of policy asks. The UN Innovation Toolkit helped us to identify who to involve in this initiative and how to move it forward. 

Identifying young people to partner with through  the UN Innovation Toolkit 

We started off wondering who to partner with and how to identify appropriate allies. In line with the spirit of the “Find Different Partners” Tool from the Partnerships module of the UN Innovation Toolkit, we first looked at our existing partnerships, inside and outside IFAD. We identified experts, technical colleagues and young professionals working on youth topics, but realized that we don’t often interact with rural young people themselves. We flipped our partner thinking, recognizing that what we think about youth may not always be true. In order to find partners differently, we leveraged the contacts of the members of our group, also tapping into the wider network we had through the World Food Forum and the IFAD Youth Desk.  

With our partners, we shaped our active participation at the World Food Forum Flagship Event, and one of our events went right to the core of harnessing the ingenuity, experiences and potential of young people: “Youth4Youth: The Role of Young Professionals in Empowering Rural Youth”. In a reflective and interactive discussion, a young professional from IFAD, an IFAD project participant and the Chair of a partner NGO shared their perspectives on the importance and role of young leaders in contributing to IFAD’s operations and made clear proposals for changes required to better serve the needs of rural youth. In closing, the Executive Director of the Kofi Annan Foundation shared her reflections and encouraged young people to take an active stance in their communities and beyond. 

The Youth4Youth event was a powerful reminder of the added value that can be created if we consciously seek working with different partners on all levels. This can open our discussion to our ecosystem of allies from the public, private and international spheres and spur ideas and innovation.  Interacting with partners from different domains and listening to their insights also sparked the appetite of the IFAD Youth Network for more. 

Enabling Young People – From Pilot to Scale 

In going forward, the Architecture module of the UN Innovation Toolkit is key for us, as we build upon the “From Pilot to Scale” Tool in order to establish Youth4Youth as a continued IFAD Youth Network initiative, a standing platform to foster mutual dialogue and understanding, and a mechanism to integrate young people’s experiences, perspectives and needs into the work of IFAD professionals. 

Thanks to the Youth4Youth event at the WFF Flagship, we already deployed our pilot and captured insights to inform our next steps. We reflected on our adopter readiness, as suggested by the Tool, and learned that on one hand young leaders are ready and well-prepared to interact and contribute, both as panellists and participants. On the other hand, IFAD professionals, young and young-at-heart, may not be aware yet of this channel to interact with youth and gain low-threshold exposure to naturally include young people’s concerns in their project work. 

The Tool also brings your focus to what infrastructure is required to make the most of any innovation or idea, and we assessed that we are already doing quite well on this. The virtual platform and channels for distribution are available, and we count with the support of IYN volunteers who are skilled and available to continue the Youth4Youth initiative. However, we need to reflect again upon the timing. In other words, whilst the WFF Flagship was an inspiring context that generated high visibility for youth action, we realized that we must put some more thought into when to organize events throughout the year and how to promote them to set the right basis for high participation and engagement. 

Drawing upon these lessons learned, we are now ready to build our scaling roadmap and set up a scaling checklist that will help us to make Youth4Youth a standing item on the IYN agenda. We want to shape an initiative with value added for IFAD colleagues who are looking to better understand issues that young people are facing in rural communities all over the world – and to actively include their learnings into their daily project work. Beyond IFAD operations, the UN Innovation Toolkit can be the right instrument for us to shape Youth4Youth as a permanent mechanism to ensure that the voices of young people and other rural heroes are considered in the formulation of public policies, programs and projects. Our pilot at the WFF Flagship was a first example of how this can be done, but there is still a lot to do. We will continue to work together as youth, for youth, because rural youth is ready to lead the way towards a resilient and sustainable future, and we can give them a platform to do so.