“Youth in many countries is synonymous [with] masculinity,” says Chernor Bah in this week’s podcast. “Across governments – and I’ve looked at a lot of youth policies – girls are invisible.”

“Youth in many countries is synonymous [with] masculinity,” says Chernor Bah in this week’s podcast. “Across governments – and I’ve looked at a lot of youth policies – girls are invisible.”

Bah, chair of the Youth Advocacy Group of the UN’s Global Education First Initiative, says that leaders are increasingly willing to discuss the challenges faced by today’s 1.8 billion young people – the largest generation the world has ever seen – but have yet to come to grips with why those challenges exist in the first place.

For Bah, many problems faced by young people, including persistently high fertility, HIV infection rates, and low rates of literacy and school completion, stem from policies that have continually failed to reach vulnerable and marginalized groups, particularly young girls ages 10 to 14.

Most young girls in Sierra Leone, where Bah was born, are far more likely to get pregnant than finish secondary school, he says. However, “it’s not a predetermined, biological outcome, it’s a result of a neglect of policy and programs over time; it’s a systematic neglect.”

Many young girls become “invisible” when they drop out of school and leave home to marry or serve as domestic workers, he explains. No longer in spaces where government programs or outreach initiatives can easily reach them, these girls aren’t included in data used to plan youth programs or policy.

“We Cherry-Picked the Low-Hanging Fruits”

As a result, says Bah, “youth programs disproportionately benefit males and exclude girls.” For example, efforts to expand education under the Millennium Development Goals appear successful, but when enrollment data is disaggregated, most of the students added were boys. “We cherry-picked the low-hanging fruits and we left out the people at the bottom,” he says.

Policymakers need to make sure their investments are directly reaching young girls, says Bah, and providing “girl only” spaces. “It costs money, it costs time, and you have to be deliberate about it…but most people think we can continue to do business as usual, while saying that the world has changed.”

Through his own activism, Bah hopes to build a sense of urgency among leaders by stressing the importance not only of young people’s futures, but of their needs today.

“I don’t understand how you can have 1.8 billion people and consider them the future,” he says. “No, they’re the now.”