Author: Urban Hub Team at Save the Children International and Save the Children Egypt WUF Team

Children and youth make up the majority of urban populations. Yet, their voices and priorities and the priorities of their caregivers are often missing from urban policies, decisions, plans, and actions. The Global Alliance Cities4Children and our members made considerable strides in bringing children and youth voices and issues and solutions relevant to them to the World Urban Forum 12 (WUF 12) held in Cairo, Egypt, in November 2024. This blog spotlights key messages from children and youth attending the forum and provides recommendations for WUF 13. 

The World Urban Forum (WUF) is the premier global conference on sustainable urbanisation and centres around SDG 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. WUF attendees include national, regional, and local government representatives, academics, business people, community leaders, urban planners, and civil society representatives.

3 questions we asked children and youth ahead of and during the WUF12  

Children and young people living in cities in Bangladesh, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Nepal, Egypt, Bangladesh, Albania, Brazil and the Philippines described what they like about their cities, the changes they would like to see and what they are doing to improve cities.   

1. What do you love about your city? 

Children and young people said they liked the following: 

• • Green and blue spaces like parks, trees, rivers and oceans 

• • Community spirit and the helping nature of neighbours 

• • Celebrating local festivals and events and access to entertainment 
    

2. What changes would you like to see in your city? 

According to children and youth, what is missing in cities includes: 

• • Affordable and quality essential services like schools, healthcare, housing and public transport 

• • Clean and safe parks and streets  

• • Mental health support  

• • Safety from violence and abuse
    

In the Children and Youth Roundtable and Children and Youth Assembly, participants raised concerns about challenges faced by underprivileged children in cities and the need for more inclusive action.  

For example, a youth participant from Brazil spoke about how children and youth in favelas are losing their lives to drugs and crime. She highlighted the need for events and workshops, like those at WUF12, to be held within favelas to understand context-specific issues and co-develop inclusive solutions for positive change. She stressed that solutions need to be holistic and include access to skills, jobs, livelihoods, and mental health support, and go beyond words like ‘participation’, ‘engagement’ and ’empowerment’. 

For cities to be child-friendly, participants said cities must have meaningful and effective platforms to engage children and youth in shaping city policies, plans and actions, particularly on matters that affect them. 

 3. What are you doing to make your cities better?  

Some of the actions children and youth are taking to improve cities include: 

• • Leading advocacy and awareness campaigns to improve neighbourhood safety, 

• • Transforming plastic waste into sustainable building materials, growing plants in plastic bottles, and  

• • Using music, poetry and drama to raise community awareness about the impacts of climate change.
    

Participants spoke with pride about initiatives they lead, such as creating pet parks to improve mental health and wellbeing, an innovative and low-cost filtration system to remove microplastics from water, and transforming waste-laden spaces into clean and green spaces in low-income communities. 

Want to hear some of this feedback yourself? Watch the full video below. 

Looking forward: How can future WUFs engage more meaningfully with children and young people? 

This is not a rhetorical question. Most children are growing up in cities today. Caregivers of small children also face many challenges in cities. So, the bigger question at WUFs should be how to make children and young people and what matters to them more central to the conversation. Below are some suggestions.  

• ‘Children and Youth’ is too large and diverse a group, so future WUFs need to make more space for this diversity: young children, caregivers, school-aged children, girls, adolescent boys and girls, children with disabilities, children in slums, and youth all have very diverse needs in neighbourhoods and cities.  

• Include the viewpoint of caregivers: It is primarily older children who are able to attend WUFs. To understand issues relevant to babies and toddlers, their caregivers’ views are central and require focused sessions to better understanding their needs and priorities in cities. Especially since urban issues like open waste and lack of access to affordable water and sanitation, air pollution, and urban heat affects the youngest children the most. 

• Young voices in sessions with policymakers and people in power: Most children and youth participants at WUF 12 were in sessions where the audience was other children and youth. These possibilities for peer exchange are important. However, it is equally important that policymakers, city mayors, and urban practitioners listen to children and converse with them on relevant sessions like housing, public space, and climate action. Manels, men-only panels, have long been criticised; today, most panels have women on them. More work needs to be done to enable intergenerational dialogue on panels. Children want to talk to people in power and decision-makers, not just each other.  

• Children and youth notice when their presence is just for the photo: They have told us how decision-makers are quick to take pictures with them but leave the session when it is time for children to speak. Adults can surely do better, and UN-Habitat must provide guidelines and protocols to ensure meaningful engagement and address power imbalances in sessions involving children and adults. 

• Children and young people were inspired and inspiring at WUF12. They asked us: how can this learning and conversation continue throughout the year? That’s something for all of us to continue to think about and work towards. A key question to shape the agenda of WUF 13 must be: How can we engage children and young people with their energy, ideas, skills, digital connectedness and appetite for learning and creating a better world to improve urban environments? 
  

WUF 12 enabled members of Cities4Children and children and youth delegates to participate in over 30 events, including panel discussions, networking events, forums, roundtables and assemblies. More importantly, children and youth, often missing in previous WUFs, were present in significant numbers, talking about what they want in cities and what they are doing to make cities safer and more liveable places for all.  For example,  Save the Children’s delegation included 12 child participants from Egypt, Bangladesh and Albania. We hope that future WUFs will expand on this and allow for more meaningful sessions that address the diverse needs of this group in more inclusive and meaningful ways. 

About the Authors

This blog was written by Save the Children’s Urban Hub team members with contributions from Save the Children Egypt staff. We are very thankful to Batoul Eladawi, Omneya Ghamry and Sara Hassan.

The Conversation about Cities Series summarises some of the key points and ideas made at public events such as webinars and conferences, participated in by Cities4Children or our partners.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. When re-sharing this content, please ensure accreditation by adding the following sentence: ‘This blog was first published by the Global Alliance – Cities4Children (www.cities4children.org/blog)’