National Youth Consensus for Peace

In 2020, at a pivotal moment in Afghanistan's fragile peace process, Yahya Qanie initiated and co-founded the National Youth Consensus for Peace (NYCP) — a first-of-its-kind, youth-led coalition uniting 244 organizations across all 34 provinces. With young people making up more than 70% of the population yet systematically shut out of peace negotiations, NYCP became a national platform to represent their voice and advocate for an inclusive, lasting peace.

Crossing ethnic, sectarian, and geographic divides, it combined grassroots civic mobilization with policy advocacy. The goal was not visibility but influence — shaping the structure, substance, and legitimacy of peace efforts, and positioning youth as essential to post-conflict governance and reconciliation.

Built on scale, independence, and data, the coalition merged 27 provincial resolutions into Afghanistan's first unified National Youth Resolution, issued on International Youth Day 2020, and advanced efforts to establish formal mechanisms for youth inclusion in national policy spaces. It carried that agenda into consultations with the High Council for National Reconciliation, the Ministry of Peace, and diplomatic missions, including the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, and the United Kingdom — challenging tokenism and asserting young people as co-authors of Afghanistan's future. Its message was clear: no peace is legitimate without the generation that will inherit it.

Through targeted campaigns, public statements, and strategic advocacy, NYCP became a civic force for accountability, inclusion, and generational ownership of peace. Its message was clear: no peace is sustainable or legitimate without the participation of the generation that will inherit it. It reaffirmed that peace is not only a matter of high-level diplomacy—it is a generational mandate.

Though suspended in 2021, NYCP remains a blueprint for youth-led civic mobilization and policy engagement — proof that when young people organize strategically, they can change who shapes their country's future.