Youth engagement in OGP should not depend on individual champions. When one committed government actor leaves, or one dedicated youth advocate moves on, the work should not collapse. Sustainable youth participation in the OGP journey requires building and protecting the structural spaces that keep engagement possible over time, regardless of who holds which position. This section covers some strategies for building those conditions.
CONTENIDO
Institutionalize Youth Representation in MSFs
Create Safe and Enabling Environments
Build Pathways for Youth Leadership
Document, Share, and Build for the Long Term
Space in Action: Case Studies
What we need is intention in action in the form of protecting spaces or having mandatory youth participation. Allocate numbers and seats for youth!
The MSF (also called a “steering committee” or “technical working group,” depending on the country) is the core governance space of OGP. Is where co-creation, implementation, and accountability decisions are made. If young people are not in the room, their priorities are not reflected in the outcome.
Requiring youth participation in MSFs, with allocated seats and real decision-making power, is one of the most impactful changes any OGP country can make. Here are some recommendations to make that representation meaningful and durable:
- Youth representatives should have equal status, information access, and voting rights to other MSF members. In other words, this should be a standing role with clear responsibilities, not a one-time invitation.
- Select youth MSF representatives through transparent, open processes rather than informal appointments. This builds legitimacy and ensures diverse representation.
- Consider establishing a dedicated Youth Working Group within the MSF or a Youth Advisory Panel. Either could act as an oversight body for specific commitments.
- Embed youth participation in the MSF terms of reference as a formal requirement, not an informal practice, so it survives political transitions.
In contexts where the composition of the MSF is fixed by law, regulation or other formal arrangements, countries can explore alternative mechanisms to ensure youth voices are systematically represented and heard throughout the OGP process.
If a government hasn’t yet identified which youth-focused or youth-led CSOs could represent youth voices in the MSF, the section on la co-creación of this Toolkit or the OGP Youth Collective can help find potential allies.
Herramientas y recursos
Giving young people a specific seat in the MSF does two things: it ensures representation and meaningful participation, and it spreads out power in decision-making. Before any meeting, it helps to map the three types of power that can exist in the room at once:
- Visible power. The official rules that determine who is invited, who can speak, and how decisions are formally made. Key questions: Who is officially at the table? Who has the right to vote or veto? Whose role is written into the terms of reference?
- Hidden power. The informal influence that shapes decisions before the meeting even starts. Key questions: Who is talking to whom before the session? Whose interests already show up in the agenda? What trade-offs were agreed behind closed doors?
- Invisible power. The cultural and social norms that silence certain voices. For instance, the unspoken belief that “elders lead and youth follow,” or that technical expertise matters more than lived experience. Key questions: Who speaks freely and who holds back? Whose ideas get taken seriously and whose get politely ignored? What would happen if a young person challenged the room?
When invisible power tries to silence young people, building relationships with allies inside the room can amplify their voice!
OGP processes depend on civil society’s freedom to operate in the civic space. In some political contexts, visible youth engagement can carry real risks, especially for young activists operating under repressive conditions. Assessing those risks before engaging youth publicly is a prerequisite for responsible participation.
“Safe” means more than physical safety. A genuinely safe and enabling environment for youth in OGP processes requires:
- Equal access to participation: Processes must be designed so that youth with disabilities, youth from rural areas, and youth speaking minority languages can engage on equal terms, free from discrimination based on identity, background, or living conditions.
- Physical and digital safety: Youth participants should not face physical, digital, or reputational risks as a result of their engagement. For instance, this includes unsafe travel to a venue, exposure to surveillance, or being publicly identified in contexts where visibility carries consequences.
- Freedom to speak without fear: Youth must be able to speak, question, and dissent without fear of consequences throughout the process.
- Clear protection mechanisms: Establish in advance what happens if a youth participant faces discrimination, harm, or censorship, and who is responsible for responding when such an incident occurs.
When civic space is under threat, youth organizations are often among the first to feel the pressure. The OGP Civic Space Support Guide offers concrete strategies and resources for CSOs on how to stay safe and defend civic space when it comes under attack. In terms of OGP processes, the OGP Rapid Response Protocol (RRP) is a mechanism CSOs can use for more serious situations, such as allegations that a member government seriously violated the OGP values and principles outlined in the Declaración de Gobierno Abierto y conectar Artículos de Gobernanza. This protocol gives OGP a formal way to intervene swiftly. It applies when a concern is urgent, meaning the IRM, Procedural Review, or the Response Policy cannot or will not address it within three months.
Herramientas y recursos
Some contexts are genuinely hostile to youth participation, whether because of political gatekeeping, cultural norms, or restrictive legislation. This does not mean engagement is impossible, but that it requires different strategies.
- Build collective strength before entering: Never send one young person alone into a hostile room. Coordinate internally first, and show up as a united group. One voice speaking for many is harder to dismiss than individual advocates.
- Documente todo: In hostile environments, documentation is protection. Record proceedings (where legal), keep written records of all promises made, and share widely.
- Engage media strategically: Strategic media coverage changes the political calculus for officials who prefer closed processes.
- Counter harmful narratives: Youth advocates in hostile environments often face misinformation or attempts to delegitimize them. The Young Peacebuilders Guide to Tackling Harmful Narratives, developed by the United Network of Young Peacebuilders, offers ways to identify, counter, and replace harmful narratives.
- Sepa cuándo dar un paso atrás: In some contexts, formal participation is genuinely dangerous. The risk should be assessed, the team protected, and an emergency plan kept ready.
For more practical guidance on navigating hostility while keeping advocacy going, Digital Democracy Initiative and Accountability Lab’s Strategic Communications Trainer’s Module is a hands-on resource. It covers how to manage visibility safely, protect an organization from digital attacks, and build long-term resilience under pressure. Their Advocacy Under Constraint Toolkit also offers concrete strategies for keeping up advocacy work when political conditions make it hard. More resources can be found aquí.
Turning today’s participants into tomorrow’s leaders requires structured pathways and opportunities for young people to grow. OGP offers multiple entry points where this can happen: co-creation roundtables, MSF meetings, IRM consultations, the OGP Global Summit, and regional events. Participating consistently across these builds youth leadership capacity, strengthens representation, and creates a generation of practitioners who understand open government from the inside.
To sustain that pipeline over time:
- Establish youth fellowship or mentorship programs pairing young advocates with experienced CSO leaders and government actors. Real change happens when youth and senior decision-makers engage as equals.
- Spotlight youth by creating dedicated opportunities for young people to present their work, lead conversations, and be recognized as experts in OGP forums and events.
- Invest in youth-led research and knowledge production. Position youth as co-authors, not just beneficiaries, and ensure their findings are treated as evidence.
- Create youth alumni networks to maintain connections and enable peer learning across generations of participants.
- Connect youth with global networks that have direct experience supporting youth participation in OGP. The organizations featured below (Laboratorio de Responsabilidad, Cohorte de Democracia Juvenil, y Governance Action Hub) are partners of the OGP Youth Collective and each bring distinct resources and expertise to different stages of the OGP journey.
Herramientas y recursos
When resources allow it, OGP actively supports hands-on learning pathways to equip young leaders with practical open governance skills. For instance, through OGP’s partnership with the Transparency International School on Integrity in Vilnius, Lithuania, scholarships have been available since 2023 for young professionals from Eastern Partnership countries (Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine). This is thanks to the EU Integrity Program.
Additionally, OGP recently supported the 2026 “Youth for Open Governance” Erasmus+ training in Barcelona. The training brought together youth workers and young leaders from 10 countries to build skills in advocacy, policy design, and civic tech. Activities included OGP co-creation process simulations, interactive role-plays, and mobile app prototyping.
Laboratorio de Responsabilidad is a global network to support and connect people demanding better governance. Operating across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they build accountability ecosystems through campaigns and advocacy, training, and coalitions of reformers.
For youth organizations engaged in OGP processes, their programs offer concrete ways to build capacity and translate accountability into action. The Accountability Incubator supports young people to develop innovative accountability solutions, while Civic Chargea provides a year-long accelerator for change agents working on inclusion, digital governance, and civic agency. Their insider-outsider work brings underrepresented voices into governance and accountability conversations through conscious music and film projects like Voice2Rep y un global film fellowship. Civic Action Teams offer a practical model for closing the feedback loop between citizens and government during implementation. Their Capacitación y facilitación programs build M&E and accountability capacity in flexible, context-sensitive formats. For tech-oriented youth, HackCorrupción connects civic innovators with resources to develop anti-corruption tools.
They also produce resources that directly complement the OGP accountability journey, including the Advocacy Under Constraint Toolkit y conectar Strategic Communications Trainer’s Module.
El Cohorte de Democracia Juvenil (YDC) is a global platform and network advancing meaningful youth involvement in democratic processes at national, regional, and global levels. Through its Youth Participation Fund, it provides financial and technical support for innovative youth participation interventions in policy-making processes. The fund is fully operational from December 2026.
OGP is the primary advocacy framework for the Youth Participation Fund because it offers exactly what the fund needs to operate: a structured multi-stage process, an established government-civil society relationship, and a built-in accountability mechanism. Organizations already engaged (or keen to become engaged) in an OGP process are already in the right place to apply.
Beyond funding, the Youth Democracy Cohort offers two key resources for youth advocates developing OGP commitments:
- Índice mundial de participación juvenil: A youth-led global dataset on political participation that can help map a country’s context and build the evidence base for advocacy.
- Menú de posibles compromisos: 33 actionable policy recommendations across five thematic areas (youth in governance, youth in government, freedom of expression, culture of political participation, and human rights) that can inform and strengthen OGP commitment proposals.
Learn more about the collaborative work between the YDC and OGP at https://youthdemocracycohort.com/ydcxogp/.
El Governance Action Hub is a global lab and accelerator that uses collaboration, inclusion, and social innovation to find new governance approaches. The initiative brings together people with different perspectives to tackle common challenges or pursue common goals. It is organized under two broad themes: a) rethinking democracy, with a focus on engaging citizens in local development; and b) influencing climate action, including a fair transition to clean energy, climate advocacy, and natural resource management.
For youth groups engaged in OGP, the Hub offers a space to connect subnational and national-level work to broader governance reform efforts. Its Governance Explorers Community offers members a Portal with virtual workspaces for collaborating in real time or on their own schedule, with shared resources around common interests. Through Action Labs, members work together to develop strategies and design projects that are then connected to funding opportunities. Its Academy aims to build a shared language to reclaim development, helping members avoid the mistakes and dependencies of the past. The approach emphasizes capacity sharing, bringing new voices from around the world to inform the future of democracy and development.
Other relevant resources are the materials of the “Reclaiming Development Global” curso, the Public Leadership Masterclass, and the general page for recursos e ideas.
Every country that tries something new—a deliberative format, a digital participation tool, or an intergenerational dialogue method—creates learning the rest of the OGP community can use. That knowledge shouldn’t stay local. Here are some suggestions for documenting and sharing what was learned:
- Document methodologies even when results are partial. The process itself has value.
- Submit case studies to OGP and its Youth Collective for inclusion in future Toolkit updates.
- Connect with the global OGP community through peer exchange mechanisms. All OGP countries participated in at least one peer exchange in 2025 to improve their processes.
Sharing lessons with the wider OGP community is one part of the picture. It’s equally important to document things internally, so the engagement itself can survive beyond a single government. Political transitions such as elections, ministerial reshuffles, and government changes are among the most common reasons sustained youth engagement collapses. Planning for them from the start matters.
- Document all formal agreements with the government in writing, with institutional (not personal) signatories.
- Build relationships across multiple government agencies, not just the OGP Point of Contact.
- Develop institutional memory. Keep records of meeting notes and decisions that new officials can access and follow up on.
- Engage with incoming officials early. Brief them on the OGP process and the youth role before they form their own view.
The goal is a youth engagement practice that outlasts any individual champion, any single government, and any single commitment or action plan.
Estado de Kaduna, Nigeria
Institutionalizing Youth-Led Governance (2021–2026)
Antecedentes: Youth participation in Kaduna State has changed dramatically over the last five years. Youth groups have used the OGP platform to move from reactive activism to help shape public policy decisions. This structured space has enabled young citizens to advocate at the highest levels of government, help design state and local budgets, and lead comprehensive public policy reviews.
Que pasó: The shift happened progressively through different processes to foster representation. First, three youth leaders were successfully nominated as co-chairs of the local OGP Steering Committee, putting young voices directly into the highest decision-making bodies. Second, youth advocates designed the OGP Youth Engagement Power Plan to shift participation from tokenistic representation to structural influence. This framework created permanent subnational mechanisms for youth to guide public policy and democratic processes. State government ministries and key public stakeholders formally committed to folding the Youth Engagement Power Plan into their official annual workplans. Third, strategic youth advocacy played a role in establishing a dedicated Ministry of Youth Development in the state.
Resultados: The sustained youth engagement led to a comprehensive review of two key policies that had stalled: the State Youth Policy and the Demographic Dividend Roadmap. The review reactivated both policies and updated them to reflect young people’s socio-economic realities today.
Youth networks also helped establish the Citizen Participatory Audit framework, a technical auditing system that empowers citizens to track budget spending, push for real transparency, and verify whether money is well spent. State legislators committed to use the Citizen Participatory Audit reports for formal parliamentary follow-ups on local government education infrastructure projects.
Lecciones clave: 1) A unified coalition of diverse youth networks is essential. Fragmented voices can be easily dismissed, but a united one, backed by authenticity and genuine commitment, commands attention and drives action. 2) Building capacity in engagement, technical analysis, and strategic advocacy has the power to turn youth from participants into leaders. It also gives youth advocates credibility that pushes legislators to act. 3) Funding youth-led organizations multiplies impact, because lived experience produces solutions that cannot come from outsiders. 4) Verbal agreements alone often mean little. Everything needs to be documented and followed up to turn promises into progress.
Cotabato del Sur, Filipinas
Open Government Youth Ambassador Program
(2022-2025)
Antecedentes: Youth in South Cotabato had very limited knowledge of concepts like access to information and open contracting, and were largely absent from the province’s open government processes.
Que pasó: As a commitment in its OGP Local plan de acción (2022–2025), the Provincial Government of South Cotabato launched the Open Government Youth Ambassador Program. The program trained at least 75 young leaders through workshops on transparency, open data, FOI, open contracting, and citizen participation. The workshops were delivered in partnership with the Youth Alliance for Freedom of Information and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), through its former CHANGE project. As ambassadors, these young leaders were expected to carry what they learned back to their communities.
Resultados: Youth Ambassadors gained a deeper working knowledge of government processes and used it to advocate directly within their own communities. The program also gave young people the knowledge needed to get more involved in policy-making.
Lecciones clave: Pairing technical training with a clear “ambassador” role turns workshop attendees into long-term multipliers of open government values.
Tetuán, Marruecos
Institutionalizing a Youth Council
within the Local Action Plan (2022–2026)
Antecedentes: Under Morocco’s Organic Law on Municipalities, consultative bodies for groups such as youth, women, and people with disabilities existed only in a purely advisory role, with no guaranteed influence over decisions.
Que pasó: As part of its OGP Local plan de acción (2022–2026), the municipality of Tétouan created a Youth Council. This gave young people a defined channel to propose ideas, contribute to policy development, and take part in decision-making. The mandate also let the Youth Council develop its own thematic action plans, not just respond to government requests.
Resultados: Youth participation shifted from being invited case-by-case to consultations to holding a standing institutional seat with its own mandate to give opinions and set priorities.
Lecciones clave: Embedding youth representation directly into an action plan’s institutional architecture, rather than leaving it to ad hoc consultations, is what allows it to survive changes in administration.
Orzhytsia and Zviahel, Ukraine
Building Youth Councils Under Wartime Conditions
(2025-2026)
Antecedentes: Ukrainian youth are often active in informal activism but largely absent from formal policy-making or governance structures, a gap made harder to close by the ongoing war’s disruption of institutional life, even in small communities.
Que pasó: As a joint compromiso in Orzhytsia’s first OGP plan de acción (2025–2026), Orzhytsia and Zviahel established Consejos de la Juventud with a formal mandate to advise local authorities. To do it, the Youth Councils launched roundtables and youth forums, created online platforms and social media to amplify youth voices, and organized youth festivals to build civic identity. In Zviahel, the local government complemented the creation of Youth Councils with practical support for youth initiatives. This included grant-writing training, a municipal competition for youth projects with funding of up to EUR 1,500 per project, and dedicated budget support for youth-led initiatives.
Resultados: Youth participation moved from informal activism into a standing advisory structure with its own visibility (such as platforms and festivals) and its own capacity-building support (such as grant writing help).
Lecciones clave: 1) Institutionalizing a Youth Council matters, but it only becomes effective when paired with practical support, like helping the council write grant proposals. 2) Small community size and wartime conditions do not have to be treated as reasons to wait. The smallest, most stressed contexts can build the same structures that larger and calmer governments often postpone.
Liberia
Partner-Led Youth Consultation (2024)
Antecedentes: Until Liberia’s fifth OGP action plan, youth had never been part of a dedicated consultation in the country’s OGP process. Engagement had remained ad hoc and largely symbolic, with no mechanism ensuring their priorities reached the co-creation table.
Que pasó: Laboratorio de Responsabilidad Liberia (the chair of Liberia’s OGP MSF) and the Federation of Liberian Youth (FLY), with the support of the Cohorte de Democracia Juvenil, convened the country’s first National Youth Consultation on Open Government. They mobilized participants through FLY’s nationwide network, deliberately reaching beyond the usual civil society circles to include youth leaders from diverse backgrounds, including persons with disabilities. However, getting the event off the ground required sustained advocacy, as the OGP National Secretariat was initially unresponsive and only endorsed the process after persistent pressure from the coalition. In this sense, the collaboration with partners was key to making the consultation with youth a reality.
Resultados: The consultation produced a formal outcome document that included recommendations on five themes: accountability and transparency, inclusive governance, judiciary and rule of law, social and economic challenges, and civic space. The document was submitted to the OGP National Secretariat and fed directly into Liberia’s fifth plan de acción (2024–2026). This process marked the first time young Liberians were substantively involved in an OGP co-creation process. The IRM credited FLY and the Youth Democracy Cohort for the inclusion of youth with disabilities as a notable achievement.
Lecciones clave: 1) Building a coalition of partners with complementary strengths creates the necessary credibility and reach to make an inclusive consultation process possible. 2) A youth network’s own outreach infrastructure is one of its most valuable assets. In this case, FLY’s nationwide presence made broad and diverse participation possible in ways that top-down government mobilization rarely achieves. 3) Producing a strong outcome document matters, but so does following up to ensure youth input is visibly reflected in the final plan.