Advancing shared prosperity with youth-led peacebuilding: a strategic imperative

The 2024 Investing and Partnering with Youth for Peace (IPYP) strategy places a thematic emphasis on shared prosperity. This focus arises from the imperative to enhance our understanding of equity and justice considerations in funding and financing youth-led peacebuilding. 

‘Conflict, violence and peace both shape and are shaped by the economy.’  —International Alert (2015)

Framing the challenge

Young people face the brunt of multiple, growing and overlapping crises. One in four young people in the world lives in a country affected by conflict. Unsurprisingly, livelihoods and education were identified among the top priorities of young people, and young people link them, and economic exclusion and inequality, to peace within their communities. Worryingly, the Independent Progress Study on YPS  found increasing scepticism and diminishing trust from young people in governments’ abilities to deliver the benefits of economic growth equitably.

Oxfam’s Inequality Kills report estimates that inequality contributes to the death of at least one person every 4 seconds. It’s worth reading that again. Every 4 seconds, a person dies because of inequality. This disproportionately affects marginalised people, including women and girls, young people and racialised groups. This is not inevitable. Economic policy is a choice influenced by power and politics. Since 1995, the top 1% have captured nearly 20 times more wealth than the bottom 50% of humanity. There are many reasons for this. For example, according to the Global Tax Evasion Report 2024, global billionaires have an effective tax rate of 0-0.5% of their wealth. 

What is shared prosperity?

Shared prosperity emerges as a countermeasure to the violence of inequality and has been adopted by the development sector as a relatively recent measure of progress. For example, in 2013, the World Bank (WB) adopted the “twin goals” of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Defining shared prosperity as increasing average incomes of the bottom 40% of the population of each country, this measure helpfully focuses on the least well-off, in line with the SDGs, to leave no one behind. However, it is limited in three ways: it tells us nothing about the equitable distribution of wealth, leaves many above the 40% distribution out of the picture, and is difficult to measure global progress. 

As the WB seeks to address these shortfalls with a new index proposal under consideration, a worrying statistic from their Poverty and Shared Prosperity report points to a substantial data gap in conflict-affected countries:

“Coverage in fragile and conflict-affected economies remains a challenge because the database represents less than 9 per cent of people living in such situations. Only five of 39 fragile and conflict-affected economies reported on shared prosperity in the latest period”

This vacuum of data is worrying if the global institutions whose mandate it is to support socio-economic development have no clear view of the scale of the challenge. 

Shared prosperity and youth and peace

The peacebuilding field has long understood the possibilities for shared prosperity in building and sustaining peace in development. This understanding manifests partly from harmful practices–enabled by and reinforcing inequality– that give rise to conflict. For example:

1. Resource extraction in mineral-rich countries where young people face poor labour conditions. Environmental degradation is commonplace, and wealth is often extracted from communities that frequently do not meaningfully benefit from these projects. Multiple cases across South America and in DRC document children as young as seven working in dangerous conditions, mining for minerals used in green technologies such as EV cars, solar and wind farms. 
2. Land grabbing: Young people are often involved in land-related conflict, for example, between farmers and herders in West and Central Africa. Indigenous youth human rights defenders are often targets of violence for defending their rights to land against private actors or governments and face multiple barriers and challenges, e.g. in Bangladesh.
3. Harmful business practices: Exploitation of young people in the labour force is common worldwide as a survey in Australia highlighted young people face economic exploitation, verbal harassment and unsafe working conditions. A study around Canada’s oil and gas exploration found detrimental health and social impacts on young people.
4. Horizontal inequalities: Young people face a global unemployment rate of around 23%. Even for employed youth, wages are often low. According to 2017 data ‘39% of employed youth in emerging and developing countries are living in extreme (less than $1.90 USD a day) or moderate poverty (between $1.90 to $3.10 USD per day)’.  What is often not discussed is how these metrics of inequalities manifest horizontally, e.g. between ethnic groups or across urban-rural divides. Similarly, these inequalities are more pronounced for marginalised youth, including young women.

Measures of peacefulness reveal aspects of shared prosperity. For example, the Institute for Economics and Peace index captures links between the equitable distribution of resources and the acceptance of the rights of others and peace. The G7+ and International Alert talk directly about achieving peace through shared prosperity and the need for actors across government, business, international agencies, and civil society to identify the levers to achieve this. Ironically, the economic dividend for investing in peace is well-founded, yet peacebuilding remains incredibly underfunded. The ‘economic peace dividend’ shows that for $1 invested in peace, there is a $16 return on investment. Research from Kenya further elaborates on the positive impact of investing in young people’s role in peacebuilding. So why does it appear we are not making progress?

 

Of course, these issues are deeply intertwined with global and local politics and power structures that reinforce inequity and injustice. Young people are often among the most marginalised and excluded from both political and economic systems. Despite this, young people are positive agents of change. However, for them to be empowered, responses to conflict need to integrate political economy analysis and work towards policies for shared prosperity that adequately respond to the violence of economic exclusion they face. 

Where do we go from here?

There are several places in the system to explore where action is needed. 

Firstly, we need a paradigm shift from a growth-at-all-costs model towards shared prosperity. There are already positive seeds to grow here with the increasing interest in well-being economics and doughnut economics. In the forthcoming UN Summit of the Future, one of the UN Secretary General’s common agenda calls for commitments to frameworks that move beyond GDP. This is supplemented by calls for more meaningful youth engagement, reforms to the financial architecture and a new agenda for peace. Recognising how these agendas are interconnected is essential to creating positive and reinforcing feedback loops. For example, meaningfully engaging young people in investments where they share in benefits equitably can contribute to peace and development.

Secondly, with the accelerating impacts of the climate and biodiversity crisis, we need to create pathways for a just transition. This means dealing with the disproportionate effects of climate change on vulnerable people and communities and ensuring shifts towards regenerative practices that are equitable and just. For example, the Just Transitions Africa report puts forward a vision for securing more resilient food, energy and industrial systems, secured through new ownership models and financed by increased loss and damage funding, debt cancellation and trade reform, among other recommendations. With 70% of the African population below the age of 30, youth leadership in this agenda is an imperative. As a growing literature demonstrates the inter-linkages between the climate crisis and conflict, financing a genuinely just transition must be grounded in shared prosperity and ecological considerations and be conflict-sensitive.

And finally, we need to shed more light on what shared prosperity looks like at the community level. Progress on land ownership and indigenous rights in the just transition is slow and requires more support. Violations of land rights and related violence impact young human rights defenders, and the related extractive investment processes reinforce inequalities which disproportionately affect marginalised young people.  With 50% of transition mineral reserves on indigenous territories and large swaths of land in marginalised rural communities, we need policy reform and investor models that recognise these rights. This should be underpinned by new legal and financial structures that share common wealth. For example, the Solar Commons Project in North America shares the common wealth of the sun, transferring net savings to community projects. Such community ownership models are not unusual, but neither are they the majority.

 

Alternative ownership enterprises shift economic value towards workers, producers and the community, providing far-reaching benefits. Cooperative models have long been known to provide community benefits. For example, in India, the Deccan Development Society enjoys both food and economic security, which proved resilient through the pandemic and nurtures biodiversity. Investments in alternative enterprises could provide a path towards addressing rising unemployment and related brain drain and migration challenges by providing dignified and community-centred opportunities. 

Achieving shared prosperity is now a strategic imperative, and demand for rethinking our economies and societies is rising (e.g., recent GIZ report). Whilst alternative models for creating shared prosperity are difficult to replicate from one community to another, there are guiding principles that underpin them: solidarity, non-violence, and redistributive justice, to name a few. Youth leadership reflects these values and challenges the power asymmetries in the current political and economic system perpetuating economic violence. It is time for actors across governments, development cooperation and the private sector to meaningfully position youth leadership in their work and adopt alternative models of economic development that simultaneously achieve peace and shared prosperity.

Further blogs will explore different shared prosperity models in practice and what this means for policymakers, investors, and civil society actors., drawing primarily on examples in the Global South and with youth leadership. We welcome contributions and comments from readers to further shape this discussion. 

The opinions in this blog reflect the authour and not of individual members of the IPYP coalition. With thanks to Benjamin Claeson and Alejandra Gutierrez, Khaled Emam and Saumya Aggarwal for their thoughtful input and comments.