By Raylenne Kambua |
Across Africa, young people are engaging with public life through digital spaces. Social media platforms, messaging apps, livestreams, and short-form video are now part of how youth learn about public issues, share experiences, and respond to matters that affect their lives.
This reflects a broader shift in how young people participate in public life, where civic engagement is no longer confined to formal institutions or organised campaigns. For many, especially those with limited access to formal institutions, mobile phones have become the main entry point into civic life.
This evolution is unfolding alongside growing global attention to digital governance and rights, reflected in frameworks such as the United Nations Global Digital Compact and the African Union Data Policy Framework. Across regional and global mechanisms, youth are increasingly recognised not only as beneficiaries of policy but as actors shaping digital and civic futures.
Yet these policy discussions are responding to changes already visible in everyday practice. Young people use digital platforms to access information, interpret public decisions, connect with peers, and engage with institutions through the channels they use daily. Understanding these practices is key to understanding how civic space itself is changing.
Digital Participation in Practice
In Kenya, the 2024 #RejectFinanceBill discussions showed young people using X and TikTok to break down tax proposals, share experiences of the rising cost of living, and mobilise protests, turning complex fiscal debates into accessible, peer-to-peer civic learning. Nigeria’s 2024 #EndBadGovernance mobilisation followed a similar pattern, with social media reframing inflation and subsidy cuts as shared public issues.
Even in contexts where civic space is shrinking, and mass mobilisation is not always possible, young people are using social media to discuss public issues, share news, and raise concerns. This is evident in discussions on accountability in Uganda, Tanzania and Senegal, especially during elections or moments of tension. Across these contexts, digital participation shapes how political views are formed and shared in everyday life.
In Mozambique, social media has become an important space for political discussion, particularly during sensitive periods when traditional media is constrained, extending the reach of public debate beyond broadcast and print channels.
In parts of the Sahel, including Mali and Niger, participation happens under more constrained conditions. Internet shutdowns, surveillance risks, and restrictive regulations shape when and how young people can engage online. Even so, messaging apps, virtual private networks (VPNs), and diaspora networks remain important channels for staying connected to civic life.
Digital Spaces as Civic Space
For many young people, civic life is increasingly shaped by digital spaces, where public issues are first encountered, discussed, and interpreted before being shared and debated within peer networks that extend beyond formal institutions.Social media is used not only for expression but also to translate policy issues into accessible language, share experiences of public services, and circulate practical information on health, education, and livelihoods.
CIVICUS civic space monitoring highlights how digital tools are central to how citizens organise and engage institutions, including in contexts where civic space is narrowed. Meanwhile, Afrobarometer research shows that young people are more active in informal and digital participation and are more likely than older persons to use social media as a source of political information.
Participation is therefore less tied to formal moments such as elections and more embedded in continuous interaction with information, discussion, and response through everyday digital communication.
This participation is becoming more accessible, as young people are increasingly able to enter public debate with basic connectivity and a smartphone, without needing formal entry points into political or civic institutions.
Engagement is also more issue-driven, organised around immediate concerns such as cost of living, education, health services, employment, taxation, and accountability, which anchor participation in everyday experience rather than formal political calendars. At the same time, participation is becoming more networked and expressive, as memes, short videos, and livestreams allow complex issues to be translated and broken down into shareable formats while enabling rapid circulation of information across dispersed networks.
These shifts point to a pattern in which participation is less tied to formal civic moments and more embedded in continuous interaction with public debate, shaped by the speed and flow of digital communication.
Implications for Participation and Inclusion
Digital participation is now part of how young people learn, connect, and navigate daily life. This has implications for inclusion because the same platforms used for civic expression are also used to access information on services, opportunities, and public systems.
Participation in civic life is increasingly shaped by inclusion in digital spaces, where access to information influences the ability to participate in public discussion. In many contexts, messaging platforms and short-form video are used to share knowledge about public services and everyday challenges, showing how civic participation and practical information often overlap.
Barriers to Digital Engagement
Despite growing participation, digital civic engagement faces constraints that influence how safely and meaningfully young people can engage in public life online.
In several contexts, internet shutdowns, surveillance practices, unwarranted arrests stemming from social media content, and platform restrictions limit access to information during moments of political tension and weaken trust in digital spaces as reliable channels for civic engagement. Legal and regulatory frameworks can further shape participation where broad provisions on misinformation, cybercrime, or public order create uncertainty and encourage self-censorship among users.
The rapid spread of online content has increased exposure to misinformation, making it harder to verify information, particularly where trusted public sources are limited. Uneven access to devices, high data costs, and gaps in digital skills also shape who can participate meaningfully and on what terms, reinforcing the same inequalities that determine access to information and services more broadly. Limited awareness of digital safety can further affect confidence in engaging openly.
These constraints are reinforced by a growing gap between the scale of youth participation online and the extent to which institutions provide structured ways to respond to what is being expressed in digital spaces. Much of this participation, therefore, does not always translate into formal decision-making, even where it is widespread and visible.
What Needs to Change
Young people are already participating in public life through digital spaces. The question is not whether this is happening, but how institutions respond to forms of engagement that take place outside formal structures.
This calls for a shift in how digital engagement is understood: not a separate or informal layer of civic life, but part of the broader system through which public debate and accountability now operate.
Governments and institutions need to protect the conditions that enable participation, including safeguarding freedom of expression, avoiding disruptions such as internet shutdowns, and ensuring that laws governing online spaces are clear, predictable, and rights-respecting, since these conditions directly shape whether participation is safe and meaningful.
It also requires more responsive and structured ways of engaging with what young people are already raising on digital platforms, so that online discussions are not left to exist in isolation but can inform decision-making in practice. This goes beyond one-way communication and calls for approaches that allow feedback, dialogue, and institutional response to the concerns and priorities circulating in digital spaces, while recognising young people not only as users of platforms but as actors shaping how civic engagement unfolds.
The task is therefore not to introduce participation, but to strengthen the conditions under which it becomes safer, more meaningful, and more likely to influence public decisions.