International Youth Day 2026 | “Different Contexts, Common Aspirations”
Article by Thando Gwinji
There is something deeply uncomfortable about the way we talk about young people.
We celebrate their resilience. We celebrate their innovation. We celebrate their ability to start businesses with almost nothing, to turn small opportunities into livelihoods, to “hustle”, to create content, to code, to farm, to sell, to build and to survive. And perhaps we should. But somewhere along the way, we began confusing resilience with a development strategy. Young people are constantly told to become entrepreneurs, create businesses, acquire skills, innovate and become economically productive. Entrepreneurship programmes have become one of the most familiar responses to youth unemployment and economic exclusion. There is value in these interventions. Young people should have access to capital, skills, markets and opportunities to build sustainable livelihoods. But we must also ask a harder question:
What happens when we make young people’s right to a dignified life dependent on their ability to become economically productive? This question matters deeply in Zimbabwe. According to ZIMSTAT, young people aged 10–35 constitute 46 percent of Zimbabwe’s population. Yet young people are navigating an economy characterised by limited formal employment, informality and increasing pressure on households to absorb economic shocks. The national unemployment rate for people aged 15 and above was 20.7 percent in the second quarter of 2025. Against this backdrop, telling young people to simply “be innovative” can become a convenient way of moving responsibility from institutions to individuals.
If you cannot find a job, start a business! If you cannot afford food, hustle! If you cannot access healthcare, find another income stream! If you cannot afford education, find a scholarship! If your community has no opportunities, create them! If you are struggling, become resilient!
Entrepreneurship is not the problem. The problem is when entrepreneurship becomes the answer to every question. A young person should be able to start a business because they have an idea, a passion or an ambition not because the absence of decent employment, social protection and public services has left them with no other choice. There is a difference. When entrepreneurship is presented as the solution to structural unemployment, poverty and inequality, we risk turning young people into individual solutions to collective problems. We begin to celebrate the young person who survives without asking why survival had to become their responsibility in the first place.
This is where the conversation about social protection becomes important. Social protection is often discussed as though it is only for the elderly, people living with disabilities or those considered “vulnerable”. But young people can also experience profound economic insecurity. A young person who has just completed university but cannot find work, a young woman supporting siblings, a young person living in a drought-affected rural community, or a young informal worker with no income when they become sick all experience forms of vulnerability. Zimbabwe’s own social protection landscape demonstrates the importance of this conversation. UNICEF notes that social sectors remain constrained by limited fiscal space, while actual disbursement for social protection in 2024 was only 18 percent by September of that year. At the same time, economic instability continues to affect households’ ability to meet basic needs. These are not simply statistics. They are questions about whether people can live with dignity.
Let us not be without because we cannot be productive. Let us instead be with with food, with healthcare, with education, with housing, with social security, with public services, with safety, with community and with dignity. Dignity should not be conditional on our productivity. This does not mean that young people should not work. It means that work should provide dignity rather than become the price of admission to dignity. It means that a young person should be able to contribute to society without being exploited by an economy that continually demands more flexibility, more resilience and more unpaid labour while offering less security. It means that young people working in the informal economy should not be invisible simply because their work does not resemble formal employment. It means recognising the young women doing unpaid care work in their homes. It means recognising the young people organising in their communities, creating art, volunteering, caring for relatives, building movements and sustaining social networks.
This year’s International Youth Day theme “Different Contexts, Common Aspirations” gives us an opportunity to think beyond the narrow image of the “successful young person”. It calls for an agenda that connects employment with social protection, economic opportunity with public services, innovation with rights, and participation with redistribution. And perhaps it is the question we should be asking this International Youth Day. Because young people are not merely the labour force of tomorrow, they are are people living today. And their right to food, healthcare, education, security, care, participation and dignity cannot be conditional on whether the market currently has a use for us.
Let us not be without because we cannot be productive. Let us be with because we are human.
That is a youth agenda worth fighting for.
#IYD2026
Youth For Innovation Trust 