For Youth and By Youth: Re-Imagining Financing for Peacebuilding

This paper presents some of the key challenges that young peacebuilders face in acquiring financial support for their work, and offers an alternative approach to address these challenges and to re-imagine current funding mechanisms towards participatory grant-making approaches that are created for young peacebuilders and run by young peacebuilders.

It serves as a resource for the international community to engage with learning on participatory grantmaking that has proven to be a successful and impactful practice to support local ownership and leadership of young local peacebuilders.

The paper builds on the learnings of the GPPAC Small Grants Scheme founded in 2018 by the network's Youth Peace and Security (YPS) Working Group. Beyond providing support for innovative ideas of young peacebuilders across the network by alleviating administrative hurdles, this funding scheme was uniquely designed based on a Youth-by-Youth Approach, meaning young people were in the lead of designing and allocating the small grants to their peers. The adopted approach prioritises the ownership of youth and amplifies the capacities of the recipients.

The Small Grants Scheme is built on three principles:

1. The principle of participatory grant-making is employed to ensure that young peacebuilders, who are the most affected by fund disbursement, are granted decision-making power.
2. The principle of authentic partnership seeks to reduce the risk of perpetuating a top-down approach to identifying priorities by utilising local knowledge and supporting capacity building and knowledge exchange.
3. The principle of holistic support provision emphasises support beyond money and encourages the process of co-creation and capacity building between the donor and the grantee and mutual responsibility of outcomes.