Listening to the Future: Youth Consultations on Peace and Security in Somalia

In 2024 the Ministry of Youth and Sports set out to build the evidence base for Somalia's eventual National Action Plan on Youth, Peace and Security. Veynuus was engaged to design the consultation process, build the instruments it would run on, carry out the fieldwork across three Federal Member States, and write the report the Ministry would hold at the end of it. The work was funded by UNDP and UNFPA, within the framework created by UN Security Council Resolution 2250.

Resolution 2250 asks member states to treat young people as participants in peace and security processes rather than as a risk to be managed. Somalia's task was to work out what that means in practice, in a country where most citizens are young and where the institutions taking peace and security decisions are not. A plan written without evidence of what young people actually say they need is a document rather than a mandate, so the Ministry's starting requirement was evidentiary: a record of youth priorities, gathered systematically enough to survive a policy process.

Gathering that record is harder than it sounds. Somali youth are not a constituency with a single position. A young woman in a displacement settlement, a graduate in a state capital with no route into public employment, and a young man in a rural district a day's travel from the nearest functioning institution are describing different versions of the same problem. Consultation built around one format flattens those differences, and a flattened finding is of little use to a ministry deciding where to place scarce resources.

There was also the question of coverage. Funding allowed consultations in Jubaland, Hirshabelle and Southwest; Banaadir, Puntland and Galmudug remained pending. That constraint shaped how the work had to be documented: the findings needed to carry their own limits on their face, so that a later reader could not mistake a three-state picture for a national one. Consultation processes lose credibility when they over-claim, and young people across Somalia have been consulted before by exercises that produced nothing.

We began with the instrument rather than the schedule. Before a single session was booked, the team built a questionnaire structured around the thematic pillars of the Youth, Peace and Security agenda: participation, protection, prevention, partnerships, and disengagement and reintegration. Working outward from the pillars, instead of from a general list of questions, meant every response could be filed against a category the Ministry would eventually have to plan and report against. It also disciplined the fieldwork: facilitators knew which ground to cover in every session, whichever direction a conversation took.

The instrument deliberately mixed closed and open items. Closed items produce something countable, which is what a monitoring framework needs. Open items produce the reasoning behind the count, which is what a minister needs to defend a priority in a room full of competing ones. Running both in the same session asks more of the facilitator, but splitting them would have broken the link between what young people said and why.

Planning and outreach were then handled region by region. Reaching only the already-organised youth wing of an existing body would have produced a tidy process and a narrow one, so outreach worked through several channels in each state. Facilitation was designed around who could speak freely in front of whom: sessions ran in smaller groups rather than as plenary hearings, and groups were composed so that the presence of an official, an elder or a male majority did not decide what a young woman was prepared to say. Facilitators were briefed to record disagreement rather than resolve it, since a consultation that returns clean consensus from a population this varied has usually manufactured it.

Delivery ran as a multi-region deployment. Each leg needed its own arrangements: authorisation from state-level authorities, a venue participants could reach and leave safely, transport for those travelling in from outside the town, and a schedule that could survive the realities of movement across the three states. The fieldwork calendar was built to absorb delay without losing sessions.

Inside the sessions, documentation ran alongside facilitation rather than after it. Structured responses were captured against the questionnaire while a second record held the narrative material: how a participant framed a problem, the example they reached for, the words they used. Participants were told at the outset what the record was for, and contributions were attributed only where the participant agreed to it.

The final stage was the report. Youth documentation from every region was consolidated, coded against the five pillars, and written up as a single consultation report submitted to the Ministry. It was built to be used rather than filed: findings grouped by pillar so they map onto the structure a National Action Plan will need, with the regional origin of each finding kept visible.

More than 100 youth voices were captured across three Federal Member States, funded by two UN agencies and consolidated into one national report addressing the five thematic pillars of the agenda. The Ministry ended the engagement holding a youth-driven knowledge base of its own, rather than a set of findings sitting inside somebody else's programme documentation.

That base has more than one use. It can inform the National Action Plan, which was its original purpose. It can also shape future programming and support cross-government accountability on youth engagement in peacebuilding, because a ministry that can cite what young people said in a specific region negotiates from a stronger position than one that can only assert it.

Research engagements are often judged by the size of the sample. That is the wrong test here. The honest description of this work is that it reached three of six Federal Member States, produced a defensible record of what was said in them, and left the Ministry with a method repeatable in Banaadir, Puntland and Galmudug when funding allows. The instrument, the facilitation protocol and the coding structure all travel without redesign.

For our Research, Data and Policy practice, it illustrates a principle we hold to firmly: the quality of a consultation is set at the design stage, not the analysis stage.

• Consultation design
• Questionnaire development
• Data collection
• Youth documentation
• Final consultation report