Do National Action Plans actually lead to action on the Youth, Peace and Security agenda?

Over three days in June, more than one hundred young people came together in the small town of Coyah on the outskirts of Guinea’s capital to debate Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) – a UN Security Council-mandated agenda aimed at greater youth inclusion in all phases of peace and security efforts. Seeing this YPS agenda realized has become increasingly important in countries like Guinea, where young people represent the majority of the population (77 per cent in Guinea) and have an important role to play supporting the country’s post-conflict transition.  

Participants at the Coyah meeting, including national youth council members and women’s rights and disability activists, enthusiastically discussed Guinea’s future, often staying past the day’s scheduled programming. By the end of the three days, they had formed a National Coalition on YPS and adopted a roadmap for a National Action Plan (NAP).  

Guinea’s youth are in good company. In 2024 alone, Benin, Liberia and Senegal held YPS inception meetings, taking important steps towards the development of NAPs; Cameroon, Chad and Niger initiated consultations on NAPs; and The Gambia validated its first NAP on YPS at the end of November. This momentum across West and Central Africa is notable given that only four NAPs on YPS had previously been developed worldwide. Despite many promises of strengthening youth participation and engagement – including in the so-called “Pact for the Future” adopted by all Member States in September 2024 – implementation of the YPS agenda and its commitments has appeared to lag behind.  

Does this wave of engagement behind NAPs signal a turning point and do NAPs hold the key to youth participation? Research for a forthcoming Thematic Review on the Secretary-General’s Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) and its support for YPS programming suggests that while these action plans do matter, they are not a silver bullet.

Why National Action Plans matter

The idea behind developing NAPs on YPS was modelled on the perceived success of similar "action plans" for advancing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. In essence, a NAP is a document adopted voluntarily by a Member State that outlines its strategy for implementing the YPS agenda, as enshrined in UNSCR 2250. Ideally, these NAPs should describe in detail the actions the Government plans to take at different levels to institutionalize and operationalize the agenda, including through prioritizing meaningful youth inclusion in decision-making processes.  

When developed though a participatory process, NAPs provide an opportunity to engage a variety of youth actors, taking stock of the current youth landscape and reflecting young people’s ideas, demands and hopes. As Fatuma Muhumed, a youth specialist who worked on the YPS initiatives in Guinea and other countries in West Africa with the UN Population Fund, observed: “National Action Plans are transformative tools for translating global commitments into concrete actions on the ground. These plans provide countries with a crucial framework for implementing UNSCR 2250, positioning youth as powerful leaders and agents of change.”

The idea of developing these NAPs gained some momentum following the third Security Council resolution on YPS, UNSCR 2535, in 2020, which called for more commitments from Member States and encouraged the development of roadmaps to facilitate youth engagement through a participatory process. In 2021, Finland became the first country to establish a NAP on YPS, followed by Nigeria (in November 2021) and the Philippines and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (both in August 2022). With the recent validation of its NAP in November 2025, The Gambia is on its way to becoming only the fifth country to do so. While this demonstrates progress, the number of States that have established YPS action plans pales in comparison to the over 100 NAPs that exist globally for the WPS agenda.

African countries have been calling attention to this disparity and are leading in the development of YPS initiatives globally, perhaps not surprising given their large and vibrant youth populations. Over the past five years, African civil society organizations, the African Union (AU), other African regional organizations and UN entities and partners in the region have made concerted efforts to push forward implementation and institutionalization of the YPS agenda. Muhumed observed a degree of momentum in these NAPs and their potential to create traction on other key peacebuilding goals and initiatives. She emphasized: “By embedding inclusive, youth-focused and gender-responsive approaches into national policies, we can create pathways for more equitable, resilient and sustainable peacebuilding outcomes.”

Yet even within Africa, progress has so far lagged behind commitments. The AU set targets for NAPs in the Implementation Plan for its Continental Framework for Youth, Peace and Security back in 2020. According to this Implementation Plan, by 2024, 25 per cent of AU Member States should have developed a YPS NAP (although only three out of 55 actually had by 2024, including The Gambia). By 2029, the target is for 50 per cent of AU Member States to have one. Perhaps to facilitate this ambitious target, recently, in June 2024, the AU convened a meeting in Dakar, Senegal, to validate and develop guidelines for NAPs on YPS.

A step forward but not a silver bullet

Although NAPs on YPS present a path toward institutionalization and domestic application of the YPS agenda, they are not free of criticism. If they are not conducted in a participatory way – with broad outreach and meaningful roles for youth – then the overarching goal of enabling young people’s agency may not be achieved. In addition, without an inclusive process, NAPs can risk being created without adequate input from diverse youth groups, leading to the exclusion of those who are most vulnerable and marginalized. Finland’s NAP is frequently held up as role model because it was the first to be adopted. Nonetheless, even Finland’s NAP process struggled to achieve diversity in its consultations.

More generally, whether NAPs are the most effective path towards institutionalizing and localizing the YPS agenda has also come under question. A common critique of NAPs is that many lack the financial resources needed for meaningful implementation. Without dedicated funding and institutional support, even the most well-intentioned and well-designed NAP processes could remain "plans for action" rather than mechanisms that actually generate action.

As part of UNU-CPR’s research on PBF support for YPS programming, the Centre interviewed youth activists working on NAPs and other youth empowerment initiatives in a range of countries. Youth activists involved in developing the DRC’s NAP described the challenges in receiving the necessary financial support for the plan’s implementation as well as sufficient political and ministerial support. Similarly, one year into the implementation of Nigeria’s NAP, the Nigerian coalition on YPS criticized the funding gap and highlighted the difficulty of keeping the process locally led and avoiding any “meddling” by international and regional actors.

Another concern is that unless appropriate monitoring and evaluation processes are put in place, Governments will not be held to account for the commitments and steps embedded within NAPs. Lacking such accountability mechanisms, NAPs may be reduced to a “politically convenient and relatively quickly ‘ticked box’” as one young peacebuilder writing on the global YPS agenda framed it.

The ongoing NAP processes across West and Central Africa show promising efforts to address these past issues. For instance, representatives from Nigeria were invited to offer insights on their own NAP experiences to participants in Guinea, including any challenges faced and lessons learned. Another positive step was the establishment of a "national coalition" on YPS during the inception meetings in Guinea. These YPS coalitions (as they are often called) have also been created in other countries where NAPs are under discussion, as a way to foster more inclusive and participatory processes, while also creating a vested coalition that can help maintain momentum and accountability for the implementation of the NAP (as well as other YPS initiatives).

There also appeared to be a stronger level of political commitment behind the Guinea process compared to some past situations. In Guinea, high-ranking Government representatives, including youth ministers, attended the closing ceremonies of the NAP initiative and actively engaged youth in other meetings, signaling a shift towards greater engagement with young people. This level of political will, together with the built-in pressure points and checks created via the YPS coalition may help ensure the NAP exercise does not simply become a “tick the box” exercise that is later forgotten.

National Action Plans to accelerate global commitments on YPS

While the NAP process in Guinea is still new, it could become a key mechanism for better addressing governance and security challenges, enabling youth to be more involved in Guinea’s transition toward sustainable peace. The next steps will involve drafting processes, supported by national facilitators to ensure youth engagement, followed by validation workshops. If the processes continue as they have begun, they may well prove a positive step forward on youth empowerment and engagement on peacebuilding.

More broadly, processes like those happening in Guinea and other West African countries can be seen as the bottom-up realization of larger global commitments and policies. In Action 20 of the Pact for the Future, the international community committed to the acceleration of their commitments on YPS, vowing to “Strengthen and implement existing youth, peace and security national and regional road maps to deliver on our commitments, and develop them where they do not exist, on a voluntary basis.” NAPs are one of the clearest ways to take this commitment forward by virtue of being the roadmaps by which Member States will follow through on YPS obligations in a way that is responsive to their country context. They may also increase awareness of YPS within national contexts, contributing to the advancement of the agenda in other ways.

However, establishing a NAP is only the first step; translating it into concrete action requires political will and institutional buy-in, which can be complex and protracted processes. The outcome of efforts like those in Guinea therefore represent not only a test of whether the youth agenda can gain traction within a country – but also of Member States’ capacity to take forward commitments under the Pact for the Future and YPS writ large.

Luisa Kern was a Research Fellow at UNU-CPR, supporting the Thematic Review on Youth, Peace and Security. As part of the Review, she spent four months with UNFPA’s West and Central Africa regional office in Dakar, where she attended the inception meeting in Coyah, Guinea, and supported other YPS efforts in the region.