Every year, on International Youth Day, we ask the same question: “What do young people need?” After more than fourteen years working alongside thousands of young people across Rwanda, I have come to believe that we are asking the wrong question. I think, a better question is: “What do young people want?” Because most of the time, they already know. That simple shift in asking, what I believe to be the right question, challenges the way we often approach youth development. Too frequently, we assume that our role is to define young people’s future. We identify their problems, write strategies about them, design projects for them, and sometimes even measure success without ever asking what success looks like from their perspective. Yet perhaps our greatest responsibility is not to imagine their future — it is to simply listen.

Looking back over the past fourteen years, from the early days of YouthConnekt Rwanda to the AGUKA Programme, entrepreneurship competitions, apprenticeships, and hundreds of visits to youth-led businesses across the country, I realize that the greatest lessons have not come from the programmes themselves, but from the young people behind them. Through the AGUKA Programme, implemented by UNDP and the Ministry of Youth and Arts with funding from the European Union (EU), I have met entrepreneurs from every province and from almost every sector imaginable. Although their journeys have been shaped by different circumstances, their aspirations have remained remarkably consistent. They want meaningful work, businesses that solve real problems, financial independence, dignity, and the opportunity to create jobs and improve the lives of others.

This year’s International Youth Day theme, “Different Contexts, Common Aspirations,” perfectly captures this reality. Whether a young person lives in Kigali, Kampala, Paris, New York or a small island in the Pacific, opportunities may differ enormously, but dreams rarely do. I have also come to realize that the most important lesson has not been how to build better youth programmes. It has been understanding the role we should, and should not, play in helping young people shape their future. Three lessons stand out.

Lesson One: Young people usually already know what they want.

One entrepreneur I often think about is Jacques Butera. When I first met him, he was running a small fashion business while still a university student. Many might assume that what transformed his journey was access to finance. It certainly helped. But when Jacques reflected on what truly changed his business, he spoke first about the mentors who challenged his thinking, helped him better understand his customers, encouraged him to think bigger, and gave him the confidence to believe in his own potential. Today, his business has grown into a thriving enterprise creating jobs for other young Rwandans. Jacques never asked someone to build his future. He simply wanted the opportunity to build it himself.

Lesson Two: Young people do not need isolated projects. They need ecosystems.

One of the biggest lessons from the AGUKA Programme did not come from a meeting room, but from listening carefully to nearly 2,000 entrepreneurs – voices gathered through one of Rwanda’s largest youth entrepreneurship tracer studies. What surprised many people was that entrepreneurs weren't primarily asking for money. Very few spoke about grants alone. Instead, they consistently highlighted access to markets, mentorship, professional networks, visibility, practical advice and opportunities to learn from entrepreneurs who had already walked the same road.

Entrepreneurs who benefited from integrated support (combining entrepreneurship training, coaching, mentorship, business development services, networking, access to finance and market opportunities) performed significantly better than those who received only one of these interventions. Success was therefore never the result of a single project. It was the product of an ecosystem.

Lesson Three: Sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is simply open one door.

Another entrepreneur, Shakira, reinforced the same lesson. As the founder of a business producing high-quality spicy oil in Rwanda, she often speaks about how the seed grant she received helped her establish and expand her business. But as her business matured, her priorities changed. She was no longer looking primarily for finance. She already knew exactly what she needed next: access to new markets, especially in West Africa, where demand for spicy products is particularly strong. Rather than redesigning her business, our role was simply to help remove that barrier. Through AGUKA, we supported her participation in an AfCFTA Women Entrepreneurs event in Nigeria, where she connected with potential buyers, distributors and business partners. Her experience reminds us that supporting young entrepreneurs is not only about providing finance; it is about helping them access the markets, networks and opportunities they have already identified.

As a father, I often reflect on these lessons beyond my professional life. Parents do not decide who their children should become. Our role is to create an environment in which they can discover their passions, encourage them when they stumble, expose them to new experiences, unlock opportunities, and gradually step back so they can find their own path.

The future of youth development will not be determined by how many workshops we organize or strategies we publish. It will depend on how effectively the ecosystems we build work for young people. Ecosystems in which they can thrive, where entrepreneurs access markets, innovators connect with investors, skills respond to tomorrow’s economy, and youth are recognized not as beneficiaries of development, but as its architects.

As we celebrate International Youth Day, perhaps it is time to stop asking what young people need and start asking what they want to achieve. This requires placing young people at the centre of every stage of our programmes, from design and implementation to monitoring and evaluation, while ensuring their voices shape decisions from the outset, not simply validate them afterwards.

Listening, however, must go beyond consultation; it must become systematic. We should invest more in youth needs assessments, baseline surveys, tracer studies and regular feedback mechanisms so that evidence not only measures results but also informs how programmes are designed and adapted. At the same time, we must move beyond isolated interventions to build integrated ecosystems that connect young people with skills, mentorship, finance, technology, markets and regional opportunities, particularly through the African Continental Free Trade Area, while preparing them for opportunities in artificial intelligence, digital transformation, the green economy and the creative industries.

Entrepreneurs like Jacques and Shakira never asked someone else to design their future. They already knew where they wanted to go. What they needed was someone willing to listen, believe in their potential, and help remove the barriers standing between their ambition and their future. If we choose to partner rather than prescribe, empower rather than direct, and listen before we lead, we will not only build better youth programmes, but we will also unlock one of the greatest sources of innovation, entrepreneurship and sustainable development our societies possess.

Nicolas Schmid is a Programme Analyst at UNDP Rwanda leading youth empowerment programmes