Youth Inclusion in the Lake Chad Basin: four key barriers

Youth inclusion in decision-making has been recognised as a strategic priority to ensure an accountable and rights-based approach to response planning in the Lake Chad Basin (LCB). This was demonstrated during the 3rd High-Level Conference in Niamey, Niger in January, where world leaders stressed the importance of youth inclusion for improving the effectiveness of humanitarian, development and peacebuilding interventions. The Grand Bargain also calls for the participation of all groups affected by crisis in making decisions that impact their lives.

The Lake Chad Basin region (comprising Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad) has been experiencing huge humanitarian and development challenges for over a decade due to the activities of Boko Haram and other violent non-state actors.

This conflict is having a profound impact on the lives of the affected populations. Tens of thousands of people have died, millions of people have been displaced and over 11 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. Climate change-related disasters, especially floods and drought, are also exacerbating displacement and increasing food insecurity. More than 5 million people in the region are struggling to get enough food, and half a million children are experiencing acute malnutrition.

While the impact of this conflict is felt widely by the local populations, young people who make up the majority of the region’s population are disproportionately impacted. Many young men in the region grapple with high levels of poverty, insufficient education systems and a lack of employment, which increases their chances to be recruited by Boko Haram. Young girls are also severely impacted. The Adolescent Girls in Crisis: Voices from the Lake Chad Basin report revealed that young women and girls suffer higher instances of sexual and gender-based violence – including rape, forced marriage and early pregnancy – limiting their education opportunities and undermining their social acceptance and earning potential.

The potential of youth inclusion

Many youths in the region suffer from a lack of voice and limited participation in politics. These experiences further young people’s sense of exclusion and often push them into violence. Addressing the Lake Chad Basin crisis effectively will require humanitarian, peacebuilding and development actors to understand what drives young people to violence and to address their aspirations and priorities. Integrating young people’s priorities into intervention programmes will facilitate their political, economic and social inclusion. This will potentially reverse their exclusion and ultimately decrease their risk of participating in violence. Youth inclusion can also provide an opportunity to tap into young people’s ingenuity, innovative capacities and skills, which can be leveraged to improve the quality of responses.

Barriers to participation

As many researchers have shown, implementing inclusive youth participation in local contexts is often difficult. Without engaging effectively with the everyday realities of young people and the complexities of the local contexts, humanitarian interventions will exacerbate their exclusion.

Here, I review four key barriers to inclusive youth participation in the LCB region, and how humanitarian actors can address them so that their interventions can be as effective as possible.

Paternalism

An important barrier to local participation widely acknowledged by critical scholars and policymakers is the paternalism or top-down approach often embedded in international aid systems. Humanitarians, despite benevolent intentions, often see themselves as compassionate, confident ‘professionals’ or ‘experts’, who have the duty of care to affected populations. On the other hand, humanitarian workers often see local populations as lacking in capacity and knowledge. This paternalistic view is based on an internalised racial superiority that privileges Eurocentric or ‘white’ knowledge over experiential knowledge.

Such a paternalistic view has huge implications for achieving genuine youth participation. The capacity of young people to put forward their understanding of the crisis and how it impacts their lives depends on whether those deemed ‘experts’ or ‘professional’s support their claims. Local youths are also better placed to understand new kinds of vulnerabilities that may not be immediately visible to humanitarian actors, due to their networks and deeper understanding of the context. Even when young people have been consulted by humanitarian actors during the design phase of interventions, their views and needs may be dismissed at the implementation phase if humanitarian ‘professionals’ distrust their views.

Youths in the LCB may also face paternalism from the elders who occupy decision-making positions. Elders are considered wise in LCB societies. As such, they may see themselves as having better knowledge of the context than the youths. This can lead the elders to impose their views in the name of acting in the youths’ interest, while in practice they are excluding the latter from participation and decision-making.

To achieve meaningful youth participation, humanitarian workers and people in decision-making positions must recognise the lack of neutrality in knowledge production within the humanitarian sector and in the local context, and how this can lead to the dismissal of youth perspectives. Humanitarian workers need to understand how expert knowledge can work together with experiential or non-expert knowledge.

Definitions of ‘youth’

‘Youth’ is a contested concept. While humanitarian workers may see youth as an age category, many youths in the LCB region, and indeed in many parts of Africa, see this grouping as a space for articulating their marginalisation. To put it in another way, many young men and women in the LCB who feel a sense of economic, political and social exclusion identify as ‘youth’ to convey their sense of disempowerment even when they fall outside the official definitions of youth. In Nigeria, for example, the national age range for youths is 18–35, but it is possible to see men and women up to the age of 45 identify as youth.

Humanitarian actors should strive to account for local definitions when deciding the age range of youths to participate in social interventions, as this will also affect who is eligible to participate in youth programmes.

A lack of intersectionality

Youths are often wrongly understood as a homogeneous category. However, different social identities – such as class, ethnicity, ability, marital status, gender, as well as other groupings can be found alongside the youth identity. Viewing youth as a uniform category overlooks the complex intersection and interplay of these diverse identities – with their varying social realities – and their influence in shaping young people’s experiences and aspirations. Youths with multiple historically oppressed identities (such as young women and girls from poor households) must be given adequate attention because they are often greatly disadvantaged when it comes to participation. Lack of formal education, fear for safety and lack of mobility to attend meetings frequently put women at a disadvantage when it comes to participating. Even when they attend meetings, cultural norms may lead to the silencing of their voices in favour of male voices.

Humanitarian actors must actively listen to the voices of young people of diverse genders and social classes, ethnicity, ability, and other identities, in order to achieve inclusive youth participation.

Elite capture

Educated youths and youths with networks, knowledge and influence are often selected as leaders to represent the interests of all youths. One reason for this is that youths with networks can serve as gatekeepers, and their influence and networks can be useful for accessing local governance structures. However, selecting ‘elite’ youths can unintentionally produce inequalities in opportunities for participation. Elite youths can dominate access to youth interventions. They can assign a much larger share of the benefits of projects to themselves, and present solutions that further their personal agendas rather than solutions that align with the priorities of the marginalised youths. Additionally, local understandings of who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad’ can lead elite youths to exclude, for example, drug users or sex workers from interventions.

Thus, the process of elite selection, if not implemented well, may reproduce exclusion. Humanitarian actors can leverage the knowledge and influence of youth representatives to enhance the effectiveness of interventions. But efforts must be made to uncover and engage with representatives that truly represent the interest of excluded youths. As Marc Sommers has argued, such transformative youth representatives can be found in uncommon places such as among male youths who meet in the street corners, among female youths who congregate to braid hair together, and indeed amongst controversial hip-hop musicians.

The kind of people selected to receive aid or participate in programmes can have a bearing on social cohesion between groups, so it is important to ensure inclusivity so that interventions don’t engender unintended impacts.

Working to achieve youth inclusion in complex contexts is difficult. But addressing these barriers as they play out in the local context and within humanitarian practices would advance inclusive youth participation and ultimately help young people rebuild their lives and society in a safe, dignified and sustainable manner.

Modesta Alozie is an Independent Consultant and the Lead Research Fellow in the Data and Displacement Humanitarian Protection Project, University of Warwick.