This document presents a reform package prepared by Jigyasa Gulati (CTC) and Tayiona Sanangurai (IHART) in response to the Emergency Relief Coordinator's challenge. It argues that youth inclusion is a system performance issue, not just a rights case, and outlines thirteen reforms across four tracks to achieve parity with commitments already extended to women-led organisations and organisations…
This document is a reform package titled 'Design Youth In, Deliver Better Outcomes', prepared by Jigyasa Gulati (CTC) and Tayiona Sanangurai (IHART) with research and technical support from various contributors. It responds to the Emergency Relief Coordinator's challenge about what the humanitarian movement should achieve in the next six months. The document is intended for humanitarian decision-makers, policymakers, and advocates focused on youth inclusion in humanitarian action.
The document begins by stating that adolescents and youth aged 10-24 represent 1.8 billion people, close to a quarter of humanity, and are often the majority in countries the humanitarian system serves. It notes that the 2026 Reset architecture has delivered named leadership, funding, and seats for women-led organisations and organisations of persons with disabilities, but has named youth-led groups only once, in a membership list, with no leadership or funding provision attached. The flagship…
Part 1, titled 'The Opportunity', draws primarily on Nigeria's HNRP Youth Compliance Assessment (2026) and triangulates findings with reports from other contexts. It highlights that reforms introduced while a new system is being built become part of the foundation, and that youth participation must be built into the new coordination architecture now, as decision-making moves toward Area-Based Coordination (ABC) platforms.
Part 2, 'Anchored in What IASC Has Already Promised', reviews the 2022 IASC Principals' Statement on Accountability to Affected People and the 2020 IASC Guidelines on Working with and for Young People. It shows how recognition without parity has happened, with youth not named in key Reset documents while women-led organisations and organisations of persons with disabilities received explicit mentions for funding and leadership roles.
Part 3, 'The Youth Performance Gap', identifies four key gaps: representation gap (youth absent from strategic coordination, e.g., Nigeria holds zero dedicated youth seats despite 2.9 million young people in severe-to-extreme need), accountability gap (weak tracking of youth inclusion commitments), information gap (age-disaggregation stops at 18, erasing the 08-24 cohort), and resource gap (funding rarely reaches youth-led actors, with less than 15% of young people reporting access to…
The final section, 'Why This Is a Performance Case, Not Only a Rights Case', argues that the Reset's own goals of localisation, access, protection, and accountability are harder to achieve without youth inclusion. It cites evidence from Nigeria, Palestine, Ukraine, and other contexts, showing that youth-led organisations are first and last responders but remain unrecognised as humanitarian actors. The document concludes that the system already depends on youth operationally, but governance has…