Listening Before Building: What Rural Youth Across Two Continents Told Us

A new EMPOWER+ report maps youth participation across seven countries and sets out what it takes to make Rural Youth Parliaments real.

Before you build something for young people, it helps to ask them how things actually work where they live. That simple principle sits at the heart of EMPOWER+, an Erasmus+ Capacity Building project that brings together partners from Botswana, Madagascar, Mauritius, Nigeria, Greece, Italy, and Romania around one shared goal: establishing and strengthening Rural Youth Parliaments in Sub-Saharan Africa.

We are pleased to share the first major analytical output of the project: the EMPOWER+ Project Report on rural youth participation. Produced under Work Package 2 and authored by Connectus, it draws together fourteen country-level research exercises completed across the seven partner countries. It is, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive comparative picture of rural youth participation assembled across these countries to date.

What we set out to learn

Rather than starting with a blueprint, the consortium started with the landscape. Each partner mapped the resources, legal frameworks, and existing good practices for rural youth participation in their country, then went further to analyse the specific tools young people use to engage, the laws that shape those opportunities, and what young people themselves had to say. The result is a body of evidence grounded in local realities rather than assumptions made from a distance.

Five things the evidence makes clear:

Rural young people are shut out of the decisions that shape their lives.

In every partner country, the right to participate exists on paper, but distance, cost, missing information, and the assumption that young people are too young to lead keep them at the margins. This exclusion is not accidental; it is what happens when participation systems are designed without rural youth in mind.

Participation is everywhere, but it rarely changes anything.

Young people attend meetings and join consultations across all seven countries, yet their input is mostly advisory. It is seldom tracked, feedback is weak, and the link between what young people say and what gets decided is almost always invisible. Symbolic participation breeds disillusionment.

Community structures are the most trusted entry points.

The spaces young people trust most are community-rooted, not formal state bodies: Kgotla assemblies and Village Development Committees in Botswana; age-grade associations in Nigeria; scouting and community networks in Madagascar; YUVA networks and Maisons Familiales Rurales in Mauritius; Local Support Groups in Italy; the Rural Youth Parliament model in Romania; and Municipal Youth Councils in Greece. Effective parliaments have to grow from this ground.

Funding gaps are a constraint everywhere.

Youth-related public spending is chronically thin across all seven countries. In several Nigerian states it falls below one percent of the budget; in Madagascar, young people simply cannot afford the transport to attend meetings. Even in Europe, participation often depends on short-term project funding rather than stable budget lines, leaving it fragile.

Europe has proven models; Sub-Saharan Africa has the energy.

Romania’s Rural Youth Parliament methodology and Italy’s Local Support Group approach offer practical, tested models. Sub-Saharan Africa brings deep community vitality and a unanimous appetite for Rural Youth Parliaments among the stakeholders consulted. EMPOWER+ exists to make that exchange genuine and two-directional.

From findings to action

The report does not stop at diagnosis. It sets out six core recommendations for designing Rural Youth Parliaments that last:

• Anchor parliaments at local level, where rural young people actually live, with real recognition and dedicated public funding from the start.
• Move from consultation to co-decision, with formal channels to submit proposals, an obligation for authorities to respond, and public tracking of outcomes.
• Design every activity for rural reality, so that timing, location, language, and cost fit rural livelihoods, with transport and subsistence support as standard.
• Work with traditional and community leaders as active partners, not passive endorsers.
• Build inclusion of the most excluded into the design from the outset, through firm commitments to young women, youth with disabilities, school dropouts, and the most remote communities.
• Plan for life after the project, by training local facilitators, embedding activities in governance calendars, and building peer networks.

What comes next

This report is a foundation, not a conclusion. The evidence and recommendations it sets out will guide the next phases of EMPOWER+ as partners move from understanding the landscape to building Rural Youth Parliaments in practice. The measure of success will be simple: what endures, and how much it changes, after the project ends.

EMPOWER+ is funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ Programme (ERASMUS-YOUTH-2025-CB-SSA, Project No. 101243075). The views expressed are those of the project and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union.