Young people should be able to hold public officials and service providers accountable for meeting their needs and rights. And this principle—known as youth social accountability—can also have a ripple effect on the health and wellbeing of young people themselves by enhancing the quality of health services and fostering more positive interactions with adolescents within health systems. 

The increased demand for minerals driven by the renewable energy transition has put China’s involvement in mining activities in Africa in the spotlight. But understanding the challenges posed by this activity means we need to situate it within broader contexts.

For Earth Day 2023, members of the Agents of Change Youth Fellowship answered this question: What is the biggest environmental or climate change related challenge facing your community today? Their responses reveal a pattern of vulnerability facing the MENA region.

Often cast into the backwaters of U.S. foreign policy, sub-Saharan Africa now looms large as the Biden Administration grapples with a wide range of global challenges. President Biden will soon host the upcoming Africa Leaders’ Summit in Washington, that acknowledges the U.S. government must do much more in Africa in order to advance U.S. interests and global prosperity.

We should be outraged by sexuality education’s colonialist connections. As a researcher and trainer based in the UK, I see how deeply blatant colonialist influences run in the field of sex education. The British empire was obsessed with the sexualities of their subjects and imagined their societies to be exotic licentious places where upper class British men could live out illicit fantasies. Yet, at the same time, these societies were deemed to be wells of immorality that needed Victorian moral education. These dual imaginaries were used to justify colonialism itself as a force to civilize non-western bodies and sexualities, and remain as ideas which echo in more contemporary discourses around controlling population and HIV.

From climate change to COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, the world is a landscape of increasing instability. Book-ending the Top 5 posts of June are two articles that explore different aspects of these converging risks. In the top post for June, Steven Gale and Mat Burrows write that globally, younger generations are becoming increasingly disengaged and discontent with their democratic governments, civil society, and institutions. Youth disillusionment is not a result of ignorance to current affairs, but rather a lack of faith in democratic institutions to address today’s most pressing global issues. Tackling youth disillusionment, suggest Gale and Burrows, begins with examining youth engagement trends and placing it at the top of the agenda.

Global risks abound these days, from climate change to the next pandemic, as well as acute supply chain disruptions, energy shortfalls, and cybersecurity threats. These challenges play out in a landscape of immense political instability fomented by the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, Iran and others, as well as dangers looming in the potential state collapse of countries like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Sudan. Taken together, the risk tally of our moment is mounting quickly.