Why this session matters to us
Most youth events at the UN are about voice. This one was about a number. The UN Youth Office used its HLPF side event to launch the first progress report of the second phase of Youth 2030, the UN’s youth strategy, and the report is built around something SDGCounting cares about more than the speeches: a scorecard. Every UN entity and every country team grades itself, on a red-yellow-green scale, on how well it works with and for young people, and the results are published on a public dashboard.
The 2026 numbers are up, sharply. So the interesting question was not whether the UN is getting better at counting youth participation. It plainly is. The question the room kept returning to, including from the people running the strategy, was whether a rising participation score is the same thing as young people gaining influence over decisions. On the evidence of the session, it is not, and the report’s own weakest number says so.
What the scorecard now shows
Launching the report, the Assistant Secretary-General walked through the headline figures. Drawing on returns from 50 UN entities and all 132 UN country teams that reported in 2025, he said the share of “green” scores rose from 56% to 62% across UN entities, and from 43% to 65% across country teams over a single year. The milestone the strategy set for itself is an 80% green threshold, and 48 of the 132 country teams cleared it, which he described as an eightfold increase on the previous report. Three entities scored a full 100%: UNDP, UNFPA and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Read straight, that is a genuine measurement achievement: a system-wide accountability instrument, with year-on-year comparability, that is moving in the right direction. The ASG was careful to frame the instrument as the point, not the celebration.
He was equally clear about what the same report exposes. Fewer than half of country teams supported integrating youth priorities into national SDG financing strategies, and he drew the line straight from that gap to the limit of participation itself.
His diagnosis of why the scores matter at all was the sharpest institutional point of the launch, and it is a measurement argument: participation that depends on individuals is not really counted, because it cannot be relied on.
The gap the scorecard cannot see
The most useful thing said all afternoon named the exact thing the green score does not capture. UNDP, one of the three entities at 100%, was the one to say it. Its Director of Governance identified the binding constraint not as participation but as the distance between participation and power.
A perfect green score, in other words, certifies that a country team consults young people and has mechanisms in place. It does not certify that anything young people said changed a decision. That is a familiar problem in indicator design: the easy thing to measure (was there a process?) stands in for the hard thing that matters (did the process bind anyone?).
Then a young leader turned the abstraction into a live measurement. Mariam Solika of Egypt, a UN Young Leader for the SDGs, ran the room through a show of hands: how many found it easy to get into a room like this, how many believed what they say gets translated into decisions, and how many believed those decisions, once made, are sustained.
Her framing was the counter-metric to the dashboard: access to the room is rising, but the outcomes the room is supposed to produce are, by her audience’s own hands, close to zero.
From consultation to something you can budget
The speakers with the most concrete answers were the ones who had moved youth participation out of the meeting and into a budget line. That is the version of participation a scorecard should reward, and it is harder to fake. Zimbabwe’s Tanatswa Amanda Chikaura, who runs the Ndinewe Foundation on youth mental health, put the resource question plainly to the member states in the room.
UNFPA, another of the 100% entities, offered the clearest institutional model: not projects, but seats. Its representative described brokering places for young people inside costed national action plans on youth, peace and security in 13 countries including Colombia, Jordan, the Gambia and South Sudan; a Cambodian volunteer scheme said to have shifted local budgets across all 25 provinces; and a digital youth well-being index in 40 Ukrainian municipalities used to steer recovery funding. The pitch was explicitly about ending the softer version of participation.
The Special Representative on Violence against Children added the piece of the accountability loop that scorecards routinely omit: not just consulting people, but going back and reporting what you did with what they told you. She has, she said, engaged more than 54,000 children directly since 2019, and the obligation that engagement creates is a reporting obligation.
The DSG closes the loop back to the number
The Deputy Secretary-General’s closing did the thing the whole session had been circling: she told the room a launched report is worthless unless it is used, and located the failure precisely where the scorecard is weakest.
She was blunt that the shortfall is not ideas or even money but delivery: “somehow we haven’t been able to get across the line on implementation.” And she handed the youth in the room the enforcement role the dashboard implies but cannot perform, asking them to hold the UN “to account” and to move through doors rather than wait to be invited through them.
Our read
Youth 2030 has done something most UN accountability efforts never manage: built a comparable, published, year-on-year scorecard that its own senior leadership treats as a report card rather than a press release, and that is genuinely improving. That is worth saying without qualification, because it is rare.
But the session was unusually honest that the scorecard measures the input, not the outcome. Green means a country team consulted young people and stood up the mechanisms. It does not mean a young person’s input changed a financing decision, which is why the report’s standout weakness, fewer than half of country teams putting youth into SDG financing strategies, and Mariam Solika’s show of no hands, are the same finding stated two ways. The most telling detail is that all three of the 100% entities, UNDP, UNFPA and OHCHR, were represented by people describing the influence gap, not denying it. When your top scorers are the ones telling you what the score misses, the honest next move is to measure the harder thing. Watch whether future editions add an indicator for youth influence over budgets and decisions, not just presence in the room.
Why it matters for the SDGs
Youth 2030 is a cross-cutting accountability instrument, so it lands hardest on SDG 17 (means of implementation, follow-up and review) and SDG 16 (inclusive, participatory decision-making), the goal whose targets are about who gets a say. The financing gap the report flags reaches directly into SDG 17’s means-of-implementation targets: participation that never touches a budget does not move a goal. And because the whole exercise turns on what the UN chooses to count about itself, it is a live case of the thing SDGCounting tracks everywhere else, whether a well-built indicator changes behaviour or just documents it.
Watch & read
- Youth 2030 Global Progress Report and the public accountability dashboard, UN Youth Office, where the green scores and scorecards live.
- Full session recording, UN Web TV.
- The other youth session this HLPF week, Future Makers, on youth-led SDG action closer to the ground.
- Where the youth financing gap connects to the wider means-of-implementation debate: Beyond GDP and the HLPF general debate · Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Figures are as stated at the launch; see the published report for the record.