A global review of youth engagement in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) innovation has found that while entry points for young people have multiplied in recent years, the institutional infrastructure needed to connect their contributions to implementation decisions and career pathways remains largely absent.
The findings come from a new UNICEF report, Youth Engagement in WASH Innovation Ecosystems: Insights on Pathways from Participation to Influence, commissioned by the UNICEF Sustainable WASH Innovation Hub. Drawing on a desk review of 84 initiatives and consultations with 54 stakeholders across government, utilities, NGOs, funders and UN agencies, the report identifies a persistent structural gap between participation and influence.
Youth are most visible at early stages of innovation: ideation, outreach and user testing. Engagement at later stages, where decisions on financing, procurement and institutional adoption are made, remains limited. The report is careful to note that this partly reflects the inherently selective nature of those processes, where authority is concentrated among actors with formal mandates and accountability for risk. But it also points to weak institutional interfaces, short funding cycles and limited organisational capacity to act on youth-generated evidence.
The operational consequences are tangible. As one UN agency representative put it: "We like youth input; procurement rules don't really allow them in final choices." Another noted: "Ideas often arrive faster than our ability to integrate them."
The report identifies three priority actions for WASH actors:
- embedding youth within real innovation processes linked to implementation and monitoring;
- connecting participation platforms to follow-on opportunities such as apprenticeships and junior roles within utilities and service providers; and
- funding continuity across the innovation lifecycle rather than one-off events.
The Sanergy Fresh Life model in Kenya, where youth are engaged as paid micro-entrepreneurs embedded in day-to-day sanitation service operations, is cited as an example of livelihood-linked engagement that supports both service delivery and workforce development, even without formal decision authority.
The report concludes that strengthening youth engagement is less about creating additional platforms and more about reinforcing the connections between youth contributions and the processes through which innovations are operationalised and scaled.
