This International Youth Day landed differently. Perhaps it was the weight of the moment. A continent where six in 10 people are under 25 years old, standing at a crossroads we cannot afford to sleepwalk through.

We have spent years calling our youth Africa’s greatest asset, repeating the phrase in conference halls and policy papers until it lost its urgency, until it became a line we recite rather than a truth we act on. This year, the moment really feels like a crossroads. Will we finally invest in the hands and minds we claim to believe in, or will we let another generation’s promise slip past us?

In Kenya, we are already into election season, and I am desperate for a narrative that departs from business as usual. We know that the youth demographic will determine the next election, but only if they register to vote and actually vote. Their frustration with the political class has made politics seem not worth it, and sitting it out seems like an option.

I hope this International Youth Day, young people resolve to be the change. But let’s be honest about where that frustration comes from. It isn’t apathy. It is exhaustion with promises recycled every five years, with leaders who remember the youth agenda only when campaign posters need faces to fill the crowd.

It is watching graduates hustle in the informal sector while the same names circulate through the same offices. Cynicism, in that light, is a rational response to being asked, again and again, to invest hope in a system that rarely reinvests in you. And yet, sitting out is not neutral. An empty voter’s card is a vacancy someone else will fill on your behalf.

Every election cycle we skip is a cycle designed without you in the room. Politicians who count on youth disillusionment are counting on exactly this: that you will complain in WhatsApp groups and Twitter Spaces, but not walk into a Huduma Centre or registration tent to make your numbers count.

Being the change this Youth Day doesn’t have to mean loving politics. It can mean something smaller and sturdier: register anyway. Interrogate manifestos instead of memes. Ask what a candidate has actually done for youth employment, the environment, education financing, and the digital economy. Organize your peers, not just your outrage. Vote not because the system deserves your faith, but because your future deserves your mark on the outcome.

This is one of the ideas captured by this year’s International Youth Day which was marked this week on August 12 under the theme, “Different Contexts, Common Aspirations”. The future of young people in Africa stands at a pivotal moment. According to an Africa Youth Employment Outlook 2026 report, Africa is home to around 532 million young people aged between 15 to 35, and unlike the rest of the world where the young population is projected to continue declining, Africa’s youth population is expected to continue increasing through the 2070s.

Currently, in Africa, our young people are facing radically different circumstances. In Sudan, young people are forced to contend with a civil war with many of them moving to exile because of it. In Zambia young people went to the polls this week for an election that could shape their future. Even within a country, the experiences of young people are radically different: the experience of a young person trying to break into Nairobi’s technology sector is different from those of a young farmer facing drought in the rural parts of the country. This is why context matters.

African migrants

Although their lives may seem different, all of them are wrestling with the same fundamental question: what kind of future do I want? It is the question a young farmer in Turkana asks, a coder in Lagos asks, a market trader in Kampala asks, and which a graduate in Nairobi asks, because this question transcends borders, languages, and circumstance, and sits at the heart of every young person’s aspiration for a life worth living.

This is not a question our leaders can afford to leave unanswered. When a generation cannot picture its future on the continent that raised it, that can quickly become a verdict. And we have already seen that verdict rendered in the starkest terms possible: thousands of African migrants, many of them young, surging into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, choosing the Mediterranean’s odds over the certainty of home. People do not risk drowning, detention, or death for a future they believe is waiting for them where they already stand. They do it because staying feels like the more dangerous bet.

That should unsettle every leader on this continent. Africa is not short of the two things young people are chasing across oceans: opportunity and dignity. It is short of leadership willing to build the systems that deliver them here.

Own homeland

Every young person who chooses a smuggler’s boat over their own homeland is a question mark hanging over our politics, our economies, and our imagination for what Africa could be.

At home, ever since young people rose up in protest in 2024 demanding good governance and a future that includes their dreams, I have been inspired by seeing them actively taking part in shaping it. In 2026, I saw the same young people organising themselves to register to vote in droves through the “Niko Kadi” movement and I have listened to them say that it is their time. What is most impressive is the fact that this movement touched all young people across the country despite their differences. Our response should not simply be celebrating young people for being resilient, innovative or to castigate them for being impatient, it should be listening and taking part in shaping the present they want and a future they see themselves as part and parcel of.

And I see these young people stepping boldly into spaces that safeguard our environment. I am inspired by the energy and dedication that young people have brought to the Wangari Maathai Foundation in Kakamega Forest. This Forest is Kenya’s only surviving remnant of the once vast Central African tropical rainforest, and a living reminder of what we stand to lose, and what we still have the power to save.

Through the Wangari Maathai Youth Hub, part of the Embassy of France’s Fonds Equipe France (FEF), some of the most inspiring young leaders I know have come together, each bringing a different skill to a shared cause. It doesn’t matter whether they code, plant, teach, offer forest tours, or organize. What unites them is a clear-eyed understanding that conservation is not charity toward nature, but an investment in their own future.

The question for us is whether we will build that present and future or if we will continue to pretend not to understand young people and speak of their prosperity as something that is in the distant future.

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Ms Mathai is the MD for Africa & Global Partnerships at the World Resources Institute and Chair of Wangari Maathai Foundation