From Dakar to Antigua and Barbuda: A shared responsibility for the young people of the world...
As the world’s young athletes gather in Senegal and Commonwealth leaders meet in Antigua and Barbuda, we have an opportunity to connect the promise of sport with the decisions that shape young people’s everyday lives. The question is what these gatherings will make possible for the young person whose community remains beyond the reach of opportunity.
The Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games run from 31 October to 13 November, marking the first Olympic sports event on African soil. CHOGM 2026 takes place from 1–4 November under a theme focused on partnerships, investment and shared prosperity. Their overlapping calendars bring Africa and the Caribbean into a common moment of international attention. We should use it to build a shared commitment to young people that continues long after the closing ceremonies and final communiqués.
The whole young person
At Youth Charter, our starting point is the whole young person: their physical health, mental and emotional wellbeing, education, relationships, identity and prospects. A sporting opportunity has greater value when it connects with the wider support that helps a young person build a life.
Sport can open a door. Arts and culture can give expression to experiences that are otherwise unheard. Digital learning can widen access to knowledge and opportunity. Each becomes more effective when it forms part of a coherent pathway, supported by trusted people and institutions willing to work together.
That is why sport for development and peace must have a holistic and integrated place in young people’s lives. Participation should connect with learning, learning with confidence and skills, and those skills with further education, decent work, enterprise and service to others. Young people should be able to see where an opportunity leads and find support to take the next step.
After more than three decades of Youth Charter work, we remain convinced that the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our legacy. Ubuntu - “I am because we are” - asks us to recognise that a young person’s future is a shared responsibility. Trust, confidence and respect must be reflected in the way we act, allocate resources and account for our decisions.
A Community Campus legacy
The Youth Charter Community Campus Model offers a practical framework for this shared responsibility. It connects existing places, people and organisations around the needs and ambitions of a community. Schools, universities, clubs, cultural organisations, businesses and public services can each contribute to a pathway that no single institution can provide alone.
Our approach is to Engage, Equip and Empower. We engage through sport, arts, culture and digital activity. We equip young people with opportunities to develop their physical, mental and emotional capabilities. We empower them to progress into education, employment and entrepreneurship, and to become contributors and leaders in their communities.
The Social Coach Leadership Programme helps connect that pathway. Social Coaches bring practical skills, lived experience and trusted relationships into community life. Their development should be supported by clear responsibilities, safeguarding, continuing learning and suitable links to specialist services when young people need them.
For Dakar, this means asking how the energy of the Games can strengthen regular opportunities in neighbourhoods, schools and community spaces. Young athletes, volunteers, students and local organisations could help shape those opportunities, alongside young people who have never entered a stadium. Access for girls, disabled young people and those facing displacement or financial exclusion must be built into the design.
For CHOGM, it means connecting commitments on youth opportunity and investment with delivery that communities can recognise and influence. Governments, development partners, universities and businesses could support locally designed campuses, Social Coach development and routes into learning and livelihoods. The same framework can be adapted across Africa, the Caribbean and other regions without assuming that every community faces the same circumstances.
A Global Call to Action with local accountability
Youth Charter’s Global Call to Action provides a way to connect this local work to a shared ambition towards 2030. Its value will depend on turning aspiration into clear responsibilities: who will deliver, where resources will go, how young people will participate and what change will be evidenced.
Our Community Campus approach aligns with seven of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals. For each proposed campus, that alignment should become a practical delivery and measurement plan. Partners should agree the starting position, the outcomes sought, the resources required and how progress will be reviewed with young people.
The evidence must go beyond attendance. We should ask whether young people sustain their involvement, develop useful skills, feel safer and more connected, and progress into education, work or enterprise. We should also ask who is missing, whose voice carries weight and whether resources are reaching the organisations doing the work.
What we ask of both gatherings
As Dakar and CHOGM consider their legacies, Youth Charter calls for five practical commitments that could connect international ambition with sustained community opportunity.
Put young people in the decisions. Support meaningful youth participation in the design, governance and review of local legacy plans, with the information and practical support needed to contribute.
Invest in people and continuity. Resource community delivery, Social Coaches, accessible facilities and coordination over a realistic period, alongside the visibility of events and campaigns.
Connect services around a shared pathway. Bring sport, culture, education, health, digital learning and enterprise partners together so young people can move between opportunities with consistent support.
Make collaboration fair. Recognise local knowledge, agree responsibilities and resources openly, and ensure community partners have a meaningful role in decisions about delivery and funding.
Publish what happens next. Identify accountable leads, agree funded milestones and report progress in language that young people and communities can understand.
These are Youth Charter proposals for consideration by organisers, governments and prospective partners. A practical next step would be to convene interested youth and community representatives with institutional and investment partners, identify initial delivery locations and develop costed plans. Within an agreed first 90 days, each proposed partnership should be able to show its local priorities, responsibilities, resource needs and route to delivery.
Peace as an everyday experience
Peace must be experienced in daily life: in safe places to meet, freedom from discrimination, constructive ways to resolve conflict and a credible opportunity to learn, work and belong. Sport can contribute to that experience when it is supported by relationships and institutions that take young people’s wider lives seriously.
The same responsibility applies to technology. Digital opportunity and artificial intelligence should help young people learn, create and participate while protecting their dignity and personal information. The human relationship at the heart of a Community Campus remains essential.
Dakar can inspire a generation. CHOGM can help create the conditions in which that inspiration becomes opportunity. Our responsibility is to connect the two through sustained local action, ethical leadership and investment that young people can see in their communities.
The young people of the world deserve a legacy they can live. That is the purpose of the Community Campus and the challenge of our Global Call to Action: to turn the attention of the world into opportunities that endure.
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