Young People Are Showing Up at City Hall—and Actually Getting Heard

There’s a line at Masaka City Hall most mornings, and it tells you something important about what happens when a city actually listens to its young people.

These aren’t the usual civic-minded volunteers or retirees with time on their hands. They’re Brian Kato, a 22-year-old looking for stability after years bouncing between casual jobs. They’re Aisha Nalubega, 19, worried about young women walking home through dark streets. They’re dozens of other young residents in a city where most people are under 25, carrying ideas, complaints, and—despite everything—hope that something might actually change.

In Uganda, where about 43 percent of young people aged 15 to 24 are neither in school, working, nor receiving training, that hope doesn’t come naturally. Neither does the patience to queue at government offices. But Masaka’s Youth Desk, created in 2024 under Mayor Florence Namayanja, has changed the equation. Coordinated by Winfred Nansikombi, the desk does something radical: it treats young people like they belong in the conversation about how their city gets run.

What makes this work isn’t flashy. The desk connects young people to job training and livelihood support. It maintains a register of job seekers. It shares information about opportunities most don’t know exist—like the Youth Livelihood Programme aimed at tackling youth unemployment. Staff organize community dialogues in neighborhoods, listen to what’s broken (potholes, broken streetlights, mental health services, safety), and relay those patterns upward to city leadership. When young entrepreneurs have ideas, they get guidance on applications. When Anthonio Kalyango pitched a community conservation project training young people to protect local wetlands, the desk helped him secure a $50,000 grant backed by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

But the real power isn’t in the programs. It’s in the shift in how young people see their relationship to government. Brian Kato got connected to vocational carpentry training.“I now know how to make furniture,”he says.“I’m not where I want to be yet, but I’m not where I was.”For Aisha, the response to her safety concerns was even slower—most of the streetlights still aren’t fixed—but something shifted.“At least now I know where to go,”she says. When you’ve grown used to being ignored by institutions, that’s not nothing.

Martha Nalukenge, the SDG officer at Equator University of Science and Technology in Masaka, nails why this matters:“When [young people] feel heard and seen, it creates a relationship and a belief that they are part of the government. It is the beginning of trust.”Not trust because everything got fixed overnight. Trust because someone wrote down what they said and invited them back to figure it out together.

Mayor Namayanja framed it clearly:“We cannot plan for Masaka without planning for young people.”It’s a line that could be plastered on every city budget document in the world. But Masaka is actually living it. Every morning, young people keep showing up at city hall. In a place where many have learned not to expect to be heard, that consistency is the clearest sign that something’s working.