The African Youth Charter and Youth Participation in Decision Making: Opportunities and Challenges

Though the youth are a demographically significant part of Africa’s population and are recognized by, among others, the African Youth Charter (AYC) as Africa’s greatest resource, they exist, in many instances, on the margins of their societies’ decisionmaking processes. Their input to decisions about policies that affect their lives is relatively less as public affairs has largely not been regarded as the domain for young people. The Charter has emphasized the need to ensure the youth’s full and active participation in all decision-making processes of their societies if the continent is to realize its full potential. This paper, drawing lessons from Botswana’s experience, looks at the opportunities and challenges of implementing the AYC goal of realizing Africa's youth's active and full participation in the decision-making processes of their societies. The paper argues that to achieve the active and full participation of the youth, African societies will not only have to deal with the remnants of an institutional milieu and political processes that are gerontocratic and have historically limited the youth’s participation in public affairs, but will also have to go beyond simple appointments to youth parliaments and executive positions and take a longitudinal view to review and address the role of key institutions such as the family, education system and political parties that are very central in the making of the youth as social beings and political actors.