





YTJN intends to once again collaborate with KYMCA to hold public hearings for the Bill with the citizens and the Assembly and then have the MCAs debate the Bill in the Assembly. This Bill once passed into law is expected to address youth unemployment, insufficient domestic resource mobilization, food insecurity, double taxation of youth operating in small and medium enterprises, teenage pregnancies, skillset mismatch amongst the youth, limited youth participation in formulation of policies and laws at County level among others.
It’s a call to action for youth to rise, engage, demand, and drive transformative change and co-creators of a new financing paradigm that truly serves the people and the planet. This piece is also a call to action for governments, multi-lateral institutions and civil society organizations to rise to the challenge of meaningful youth inclusion.
The conversation then drifted on questions on how to handle disputes in the absence of tax treaties. For developing countries, the answer was simple … “No treaty, no dispute-resolution mechanism.” For them, the Protocol should not create new legal bases.
But across the room, private sector voices insisted that disputes do not wait for treaties; businesses struggle with uncertainty, and governments lose revenue. They pressed for innovations, with some calling for strengthening MAP, others calling for coordinated unilateral Advance Pricing Agreements (APAs), and others for the view that temporary unilateral relief would prevent double taxation.
As the Harare Declaration states, the African youth bulge as an engine for the continent’s structural transformation agenda is at risk of being a missed opportunity due to being saddled with accumulated debt, while potentially being locked out of accessing finance that is desperately needed to invest in them, and making them carry the burden of a mortgaged future. Instead of investing in our potential, governments are forced to divert billions to creditors, too often to lenders who prioritise profit over people. This is not only an economic imbalance; it is a generational betrayal. We thus demand debt and tax justice that put people and the planet first.
A key discussion point was the looming public debt crisis, driven more by domestic borrowing than external sources. This inward borrowing approach has the unintended effect of shrinking fiscal space and crowding out essential public services.
Youth for Tax Justice Network (YTJN) proposes the Pan African Creative Arts Youth Competition. This initiative seeks to harness the creativity of African youth to foster innovative ideas and grassroots awareness around critical economic governance topics, including sovereign debt, the AfCFTA, climate finance, asset recovery, and the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.