African Youths as the seventh region of the African Union By Abdou Samb
OPINION
Not a Gift. A Lever.
African youth as the seventh region of the African Union
By Abdou Samb
In the coming weeks, the world’s attention will turn to New York. African heads of state will address the United Nations General Assembly on a theme that binds the continent more tightly than any other: Leaving no one behind — acting together for peace, sustainable development and human dignity for present and future generations.
Leaving no one behind begins with not leaving behind one’s own majority. Before speaking to the world of the dignity of generations yet to come, Africa must say whether it is prepared to give a real place to the generation already here.
In February 2026, at the 39th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union in Addis Ababa, I pointed to a structural failing. By recognising the diaspora as the “sixth region” on 11 July 2003, the Union took account of those whom geography had placed at a distance from the continent. It has yet to address an exclusion no less profound: that of its youth. Generational exclusion is no less contrary to Pan-African principles than geographic exclusion.
Over the months that followed, through consultations with actors from the African Union and the diaspora, the proposal was refined. On 16 June in Johannesburg, more than a thousand young Africans took it up and affirmed it with force: their formal recognition as the seventh region of the continent. The Foundation’s teams then carried that momentum to Bujumbura, at the celebrations marking twenty years of the African Youth Charter.
The idea met with a favourable response. It is appealing. It is just. In many respects, it is even necessary. But a favourable reception is not yet a transformation. It is sometimes the very moment when ideas are most at risk of being diluted. That is precisely why we cannot allow it to harden into a mere symbol.
The sixth region is the warning. The 2003 decision was a historic advance. It affirmed that those whom migration had separated from the continent remain stakeholders in its destiny. More than twenty years on, however, that recognition has not translated into equivalent influence: consultative status without a vote on the Executive Council, a marginal budget, and only an intermittent presence in major decisions. These are the lessons that must be drawn for the seventh region: so that symbolic recognition is never mistaken for transformation.
For decades Africa has spoken of its young people as its “future” — a convenient formula that allows everything to be promised and almost nothing to be delivered. African youth — more than 60 per cent of the continent’s population — remain largely absent from the institutions they are meant to inherit. According to the African Union itself, fewer than 5 per cent of leadership posts in continental institutions are held by people under the age of 35.
To make them a region is to offer them a voice, a budget and power. It is an institutional revolution. But institutional revolutions have a flaw: they can absorb without transforming. They open seats while preserving the logics that long kept those same young people at a distance. That is precisely what must be avoided.
That is why access cannot rest on co-optation. It must rest on merit: the real possibility for competence to reach positions of responsibility, independently of networks. Without that, the seventh region would reproduce the very blockages it claims to correct.
It must therefore be an instrument, not an honour: a genuine capacity to initiate, resources of its own with which to act, and public scrutiny of its impact — all underpinned by rules of access founded on merit rather than co-optation. The median age in Africa is 19; that of its heads of state is well above 60. Narrowing that gap requires institutions able to open pathways — and to answer for them.
The seventh region is not a gift the African Union confers upon the young. It is an inheritance we are building for them — an inheritance that will be worth only as much as the rigour of the rules on which it rests.
Talent without opportunity remains a promise in suffering. An opportunity poorly constructed can also become a cage.
Should African youth really be given a seat? Yes — if that seat is a beginning, not an end. A lever, not one more symbol.
The question is no longer whether Africa must speak to the world, but whether it is prepared to speak to itself. New York is the podium. The seventh region is the instrument. What remains is that it should not end as the sixth did: recognition without transformation.
Abdou Samb
President, Abdou Samb Foundation
Honorary Ambassador to the Pan-African Parliament for the Diaspora
