Global Youth and Adolescents Recommendations Priorities Document

1. Eradicate poverty in all its forms, including the feminization of poverty, through targeted, gender-transformative, and disability-inclusive policies, universal and sustainable social protection, and enhanced international cooperation.

2. Mandate universal access to sustained, inclusive, equitable, quality, and gender-transformative education throughout the life course, ensuring retainment, with increased financing and rights-based curricula, including evidence-based comprehensive sexuality education.

3. Implement universal health coverage with targeted, gender-transformative, and disability-inclusive programs addressing the health needs of women and girls, in all their diversity, including sexual and reproductive health, mental health, menstrual health, and access to affordable medicines, vaccines, and health technologies.

4. Eliminate all forms of gender-based violence, online and offline, by eradicating root causes, with full respect for the rights of survivors, strengthening survivor-centered support systems, ensuring consent-based legal definitions of rape, and protecting privacy through sensitized justice and law enforcement systems.

5. Prioritize sustainable peace by including young women and girls, in all their diversity in peacebuilding efforts, reaffirming the Youth Peace and Security Agenda and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, and advance ceasefires, conflict resolution and demilitarization, including the reduction and redirection of military expenditure to initiatives advancing gender equality and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

6. Realize women’s economic justice and rights by implementing all ILO standards and UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, enforcing human rights due diligence in global supply chains, dismantling exploitative economic systems, recognizing and redistributing unpaid, underpaid and unrecognized care work, guaranteeing workplace rights, including organizing, unionizing, and collective bargaining, and ensuring gender-transformative social protection, social security, and equitable resource redistribution.

7. Institutionalize the meaningful engagement of young people and young feminist leadership, especially of young women and girls, in all their diversity, by dismantling barriers, shifting power dynamics, adopting co-creation methods, committing adequate funding, and ensuring safe, inclusive participation in decision-making and across the UN system at all levels.

8. Stress the need for gender-transformative institutional mechanisms, reaffirming UN Women’s vital role, calling for increased and sustainable funding, implementing the recommendations of the Independent Review of the UN System’s Capacity to deliver on Gender Equality, and institutionalizing feminist principles in senior UN appointments, including the appointment of the next UN Secretary-General.

9. Uphold and fully implement all human rights obligations and Human Rights Council resolutions, ensuring adequate resourcing for UN human rights mechanisms, and guaranteeing the safety, rights, and freedoms of human rights, environmental, and climate defenders, especially women, girls, and young people, in all their diversity, by repealing restrictive laws, countering impunity and ‘red-tagging’, and enforcing the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, to provide safety and protections.

10. Address the misuse of disinformation campaigns that hinder the full, effective, meaningful, and safe participation and leadership of women and young women, in all their diversity, by establishing enforceable international mechanisms for transparency and accountability from technology companies, digital platforms, and media outlets, eliminating internet restrictions and censorship, and mandating fact-checking policies to combat misinformation and disinformation and protect marginalized groups.

11. Reaffirm the Paris Agreement and all international climate commitments, acknowledging the disproportionate impacts of climate change on women and girls, in all their diversity, particularly those facing intersecting discrimination, and address historical injustices by providing $5 trillion USD in public financial resources for developing countries, especially for Small Islands Developing States (SIDS), Least Developed Countries (LDCs), and Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs), equitably phasing out fossil fuels through a gender just transition, implementing gender-transformative climate strategies, and ensuring reparative, redistributive policies, while protecting environmental defenders, especially young women and girls, and supporting Indigenous-led, gender-responsive climate solutions.

12. Accelerate efforts to provide adequate resources, including capacity building and financial support, to increase the leadership of girls, in all their diversity, across all decision-making processes, ensuring their full, effective, and meaningful participation and engagement at local, national, regional, and international levels, with full respect for their human rights to lead in the design, implementation, evaluation, and governance of policies and programs.

13. Mandate unimpeded access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health and rights, for women and girls, in all their diversity, including the right to bodily autonomy, and the right to have control over, and to decide freely on all matters related to their sexuality, integrating such rights into national and regional strategies, policies, and programs.

14. End the corporate capture of UN and government funding and processes through implementing transparent and mandatory public disclosure of all private sector contributions, reviewing corporate involvement across all UN processes, ensuring the demonstration of full adherence to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, with strict criteria on gender equality and environmental sustainability, as preconditions for engagement; and halting austerity measures and the privatization of essential services.

15. Adopt transparent, community-led accountability mechanisms that center the rights and leadership of those most impacted by inequalities, especially women and girls, in all their diversity, ensuring gender equality and justice through inclusive, accessible, participatory, meaningful, and binding measures at all levels.

16. Ensure participatory democracy that fosters youth, adolescent, and feminist movements, protects human rights, including freedom of speech, expression, organizing, unionizing, and collective bargaining; eliminates restrictions on foreign funding opportunities; and ends the resourcing and political backing of state and non-state anti-gender and anti-rights movements.

17. Center the full, effective, safe, and meaningful participation and leadership of adolescent girls, in all their diversity, across decision-making processes, addressing gender and age-specific barriers, and upholding their human rights, including protection from all forms of violence, harmful practices, and unequal care burdens.

18. Promote development justice by halting the exploitation of the Global South, dismantling colonial and capitalist hierarchies, and adopting decolonized, feminist approaches to power, resources, and economic models to redress historical and ongoing injustices that disproportionately impact women and girls, in all their diversity.

19. Increase sustainable, transparent, and flexible funding for feminist, youth and adolescent-led, and marginalized community-led movements, particularly in the Global South, to support grassroots participation in national, regional, and global processes; and challenge traditional philanthropic structures that hinders the full, effective, and meaningful engagement of women and girls, in all their diversity.

20. Adopt feminist financing approaches that prioritize gender equality, human rights, and social and environmental justice, scale up Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitments, and ensure financing for feminist movements and leadership, prioritizing youth-led, adolescent-led, and girl-led organizations, networks, and collectives in the Global South, ensuring debt cancellations and relief, tax justice, and ending austerity; and pursuing urgent gender-transformative reforms of the international financial architecture and multilateral development banks (MDBs).

21. Eliminate the gender-digital divide and barriers to science, technology, and innovation for women and girls, in all their diversity, by challenging the narrative of rapid digitalization, decolonizing tech infrastructure; delivering accessible and affordable access to the internet, fostering digital literacy, promoting data sovereignty, harnessing the potential while mitigating the risks of new and emerging technologies, eliminating all forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and holding technology companies and governments accountable for online and offline human rights abuses.

22. Hold men and boys accountable as strategic partners in achieving gender equality, transforming toxic, negative, and harmful masculinities into those that are positive, rights-based, and feminist, by dismantling patriarchal systems, challenging harmful social norms, and ensuring their active role in advancing gender equality.

23. Ensure the full implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by making all policies disability-inclusive and gender-transformative, centering the leadership of women and girls with disabilities, in all their diversity, across decision-making and tracking progress through disaggregated data.

24. Decriminalize laws against LGBTQIA+ persons and people of diverse sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics, implement inclusive policies and laws that ensure full human rights protections, as well as the leadership and participation of LGBTQIA+ persons, while addressing all forms of discrimination, harassment, and violence, online and offline.

25. Ensure the human rights and safety of migrant, refugee, including climate refugee, forcibly displaced, and asylum-seeking women and girls, in all their diversity, addressing the drivers of displacement, and promote gender-transformative and rights-based asylum systems, while recognizing their positive contributions and tackling systemic, inter alia, economic, social, cultural, political, and environmental inequality and violence.

26. Respect, protect, and uphold the rights of all Indigenous women and girls, in all their diversity, ensuring their leadership in decision-making, access to resources, land and environmental rights, and the protection of their traditions and knowledge, while fully implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples through decolonial and feminist social contracts and frameworks of accountability.

27. Ensure inclusive policies and frameworks for all rural women and girls, in all their diversity, especially smallholders, farmers, recognizing the definition of ‘women farmers’, to secure equal rights of ownership and control over livelihood resources and land rights, promoting their leadership, and economic justice, while advancing gender equality in agriculture, food system transformation, food security, and respect of seed sovereignty.

28. Uphold the right to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene for all, addressing all forms of pollution and gender-based violence, ensuring universal access to sanitation facilities, protecting ecosystems, and prioritizing women’s and girls’ leadership in water, sanitation, and hygiene-related decision-making and policy-making processes, at all levels.

29. Center future generations, gender-transformative strategic foresight, and anticipatory governance across decision-making and policy-making processes at all levels, to ensure long-term thinking and planning, implementing practical mechanisms for safeguarding the interests and preserving the rights of future generations at all levels.

30. Reaffirm the importance of the Generation Equality Forum and the implementation of its Global Acceleration Plan, its six Action Coalitions and its Compact, encouraging continued and sustained support for its initiatives beyond 2026, including through the mobilization of political and financial resources, especially for young people, in all their diversity

Acknowledgments With gratitude to the Beijing+30 Youth Steering Committee, The Youth Cafe, and Young Feminist Caucus, with the support of UN Women, for convening, collating, and editing the Recommendations, and especially to the over 16,000 young people and adolescents from across the world who have contributed. In solidarity with young people and adolescents, in all their diversity. Please note that the figure of 16,000 young people is a minimal (baseline) estimate. Young people who submitted their recommendations conducted and submitted them through consultations (in-person, online, or hybrid), written contributions, multimedia, poetry, and workshops, among others. 5