Who gets to shape the future? Youth, trust and Africa’s just transition

The climate crisis is often described in terms of urgency, targets and transitions. Yet beneath these technical conversations lies a more fundamental question: Who gets to shape the future being designed? This question is not abstract. It is deeply political. It is about power, participation and whose knowledge is considered legitimate in defining what a “just transition” should look like.

For many young people like me across Africa, this question is lived daily. While youth are consistently positioned as key stakeholders in climate action, they are far less present in the spaces where decisions are made about priorities, funding, and systems design. This creates a persistent gap between being included in conversations and being able to influence outcomes. The result is a growing disconnect between those who will live with the consequences of today’s decisions and those who have the power to make them.

This reality sits at the heart of both climate philanthropy and conversations about a just transition. It also helps explain why climate anxiety has become such a defining experience for many young people. Climate anxiety is often described as the emotional distress associated with climate change. While climate impacts themselves contribute to this anxiety, there is another dimension that receives less attention, which is powerlessness. When people can clearly see the challenges ahead but have limited influence over the systems responding to them, anxiety becomes not only emotional, but political. It reflects a breakdown in agency.

Yet, as young people across Africa, we are not only defined by this condition. We are actively responding to it. My own journey began in 2022 when I organised a community clean-up project after witnessing how poor waste management was contributing to flooding and environmental degradation in my community. What started as a local response to a visible problem grew into the establishment of EcoSmart Club, a youth-led organisation focused on building environmental awareness and action across schools and communities. Over time, this work expanded to include disability-inclusive climate initiatives and efforts to document indigenous African solutions to sustainability challenges. Through this journey, I have also participated in initiatives such as the SOS Children’s Villages EcoChampions programme, which has supported and strengthened our work. Along the way, I learned that while young people may not always control the systems around them, taking action is one way we reclaim agency within them.

My experience is not unique. Across communities, youth are organising, innovating, advocating and building solutions to climate and development challenges. From grassroots adaptation initiatives to environmental education programmes and climate justice movements, we are already exercising agency in practice, even when systems do not fully recognise or resource it.

However, this agency is often constrained by the very structures designed to support it. In climate philanthropy, funding systems can unintentionally reproduce the same inequalities they aim to address. One challenge is the scale of investment. A 2025 study by the Youth Climate Justice Fund found that between 2022 and 2024, only 0.96% of grants from major climate foundations supported youth-led climate initiatives.

Yet the issue is not only how much funding reaches young people, but also how that funding is designed. Short-term project cycles, project-based funding, rigid reporting requirements, partial or delayed disbursements, and expectations of unpaid labour place significant pressure on youth-led organisations. Rather than strengthening agency, these practices can undermine the very leadership, resilience, and long-term impact that philanthropy aims to support. Prompting us to reflect if current funding models are designed to enable agency, or to manage it?

A similar tension is visible in how Africa is positioned within global climate and development discourse. Oftentimes, Africa is framed primarily through vulnerability. While vulnerability is real and must be acknowledged, it is not the full picture. It risks obscuring the depth of innovation, knowledge systems, and leadership that already exist across the continent. In many African communities, sustainability is not a new agenda, it is embedded in everyday practice. Long before “circular economy” became a global policy language, systems of repair, reuse, sharing, and resource efficiency were already part of community life.

In southwestern Nigeria, for example, Onípàró women have long sustained community-based textile systems built on reuse, exchange, and repair. These practices are not framed as innovation within their communities, they are simply ways of life that sustain both livelihoods and environmental stewardship. Yet within global climate frameworks, such systems are often overlooked as legitimate knowledge. So, whose knowledge counts as legitimate?

If a just transition is to be meaningful in Africa, it cannot be limited to technological substitution, imported solutions or externally designed policy frameworks. It must include recognition and investment in the systems that already exist within communities. It must also expand to include those whose knowledge is considered valid in shaping solutions.

This is where youth capacity building becomes essential. African youth are already part of the transition. What remains uncertain is the role we will play. Whether we will be positioned as policymakers, innovators, manufacturers of green technologies and system shapers or merely consumers of transition solutions designed elsewhere? Agency for youth is not only about voice or participation. It is also about access to skills, resources and pathways that allow young people to shape the transition in tangible ways. If Africa’s just transition is to be led from within the continent, then investment in green skills development, innovation ecosystems, exchange programmes and youth capacity-building is not optional, it is foundational.

Realising this vision requires more than incremental reform in philanthropy. It requires a shift in how power is distributed, from control to trust, from extraction to partnership, and from externally defined solutions to locally grounded leadership. It also requires recognising that trust is not passive, it is operational. It is reflected in who is funded, how long they are funded for, whether they are compensated for their labour, and whether they are involved in defining success from the outset.

Ultimately, both climate anxiety and Africa’s just transition point to the same underlying truth, that agency matters. Where agency is constrained, anxiety grows. Where agency is supported, innovation, leadership, and resilience emerge.

The future is not limited by a lack of solutions. The solutions already exist in communities, youth movements and indigenous systems across the continent. The question is whether philanthropists are prepared to trust and invest in the people creating them, and, in doing so, expand who gets to shape the future.