Our Youth Are Not Currency: From Canada to Sub-Saharan Africa, Exploitation Must End

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I have watched service providers, organisations, companies, government agencies, even individuals, line their pockets at the expense of young people. This reality is not confined to one geography. From Canadian cities to communities across Sub-Saharan Africa, the same troubling pattern repeats itself: youth are positioned as beneficiaries in name, but treated as currency in practice.

In Canada, youth-focused programmes are often wrapped in the language of inclusion, reconciliation, employability, and innovation. Yet too many initiatives prioritise funding compliance, institutional visibility, and political timelines over real, sustained outcomes for young people. Youth become data points for grants, success stories for annual reports, and photos for press releases, while systemic barriers such as precarious employment, housing insecurity, racial inequities, and underfunded mental health supports remain largely unaddressed.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, the dynamics are different, but the exploitation is strikingly familiar. International NGOs, donors, and intermediaries frequently extract value from youth narratives of poverty, displacement, or resilience to secure funding and legitimacy. Young people are showcased in proposals and conferences, yet excluded from decision-making, budget control, and long-term leadership. Programmes come and go with donor cycles, leaving communities fatigued and young people disillusioned.

In both contexts 🥣, the problem is not a lack of goodwill, it is a system that rewards performance over impact.

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Do these institutions truly want transformation, or is maintaining youth dependency more profitable than dismantling the structures that marginalise them? When accountability flows upward to funders and governments rather than outward to young people themselves, exploitation becomes institutionalised. Consultation replaces consent. Participation replaces power.

Let us be honest, this is not youth development. It is extraction.

Whether in Toronto or Lagos, Ottawa or Accra, young people are too often invited into spaces only after decisions have already been made. Their insights are welcomed, but only when they do not disrupt existing hierarchies. Their labour is unpaid or underpaid. Their trauma is mined for storytelling. Their futures are deferred in the name of pilot projects and lessons learned.

Our youth are not projects. They are not marketing tools. They are not a means to organisational survival.

Real change, whether in Canada or Sub-Saharan Africa, requires a fundamental shift in power. Young people must be resourced as leaders, not managed as risks. Funding must prioritise long-term, community-led solutions over short-term deliverables. Governments, councils, NGOs, and donors must be willing to relinquish control, share decision-making, and be held accountable by the very youth they claim to serve.

Anything less is not reform, it is complicity.

Young people are watching. Across borders, cultures, and continents, they are asking the same question: Who truly benefits from the systems built in our name? Our response will determine whether the future is one of justice and dignity, or another cycle of exploitation dressed up as opportunity.