Piece by Peace: A Collaborative UNESCO Youth Movement to a Brighter Future
STATEMENT
Tobya Monté
30 juli 2026
Youth representatives from different countries call on UNESCO and UNESCO's National Commissions to improve youth participation and youth engagement.
Appendix 2: What is meaningful youth engagement?
- Genuine youth engagement recognizes young people as active rights-holders that have both a unique and valuable perspective of the world, and the competence to share this perspective in a substantiated and respectful way.
- Youth engagement should be permanently and structurally embedded. Youth should at least be appointed an advisory role, and preferably a participative role, allowing them to have a position equal to other National Commission members. They should be welcomed to form a substantiated opinion on national programmes, actions and decision-making processes, and this opinion should be listened to and reflected on.
- Meaningful youth engagement requires a lived culture of mutual respect and appreciation between generations. This safe environment should be co-produced and regularly reflected on.
- National Commissions should provide transparent, tangible follow-ups to their youth participation format to show how their perspectives were incorporated into next stages of decision-making processes.
- Youth participation formats should continuously develop themselves through internal evaluation, and through international peer-to-peer learning. To achieve this, visibility on the National Commission website and/or on social media is crucial. On an international level, an international platform should be created that enables direct connections.
- Youth engagement should actively reduce systemic barriers for underprivileged and vulnerable young people. Frameworks must explicitly represent young people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, genders, locations (rural vs. urban), local communities and need to take prior discriminatory experiences into consideration.