Business Leadership Guide to the Action Agenda for Adolescents

Background and framework

This document provides guidance on how the private sector can actively contribute to and align with the Agenda. It translates each of the seven asks into meaningful business actions, offers suggestions for additional resources, provides better practice examples, and guides on how to link commitments to action to existing Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) accountability frameworks to make them measurable and transparent without duplication of efforts. We welcome input and better practice examples of how businesses can step up and take action. The aim is to mobilize and grow the number of businesses that proactively pledge to support the Agenda for Action for Adolescents, recognizing that every action counts. A small first step is for private sector organizations to commit to the 1.8bn Panel Pledge.

The Agenda for Action for Adolescents, shaped by expert analysis of the voices of 1.2 million young participants in the "What Young People Want" initiative from over 90 countries, outlines seven immediate priorities for empowering adolescents and youth. It envisions a world where they can autonomously determine their lives, free from harm and discrimination, while fostering a sense of belonging in nurturing environments. This Agenda serves as a roadmap for governments, the private sector, and other stakeholders to develop policies and programs aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, guiding the post-2030 global development agenda co-created with and for adolescents and youth.

Adolescent Well-being Investment case

It is imperative to acknowledge the private sector's pivotal role as a key ally in shaping a prosperous future for adolescents and youth. We urge the private sector to thoroughly review the insights of the recently published Executive summary of the forthcoming Adolescent Well-being Investment Case "Adolescents in a Changing World: the case for urgent investment" which not only underscores the ethical and business imperatives of the private sector and all stakeholders',but also starkly highlights the costs of inaction if investments in adolescents are not increased. In a world brimming with potential, failing to invest in the well-being of young people risks not only the loss of a healthier, more skilled workforce, but also the forfeiture of innovative ideas and leadership that could drive businesses and societies forward. For the private sector, inaction means missing out on the opportunity to cultivate a robust consumer base and a more dynamic, sustainable business environment. This scenario could lead to diminished economic vitality and societal progress. On the contrary, proactive engagement in this agenda offers a path to enrich young lives and secure a thriving, resilient business landscape. By investing in adolescents' health, education, and empowerment, the private sector can unlock a treasure trove of human capital, ensuring long-term business success and societal well-being. Let us then move forward with a shared vision and commitment, understanding that our actions today will determine the richness of our shared future.

Companies signing up to the Agenda for Action for Adolescents Business Leadership Pledge commit to:

1. Mobilizing measurable commitments and communicating progress as part of their annual ESG reporting mechanisms.
2. Taking evidence-based action that builds on the lived experiences of adolescents and youth to strengthen decision-making and accountability based on high-quality data and evidence co-created with adolescents.
3. Promoting co-leadership with adolescents to meaningfully engage and empower adolescents and young people in all their diversity to become agents of change is essential. We are committed to ensuring that long-term business and sustainability strategies, targets, and programs are developed with equal participation and input from them. Their perspectives and experiences should inform all critical decisions that address adolescents' and youths' well-being. Importantly, we recognize the value of their contributions and are dedicated to providing appropriate remuneration and compensation for their work, ensuring equitable and ethical collaboration.
4. Facilitating engagement of adolescent and youth groups as a key stakeholder group, ensuring that company multi-stakeholder platforms, dialogues, and decisions are informed by their perspectives, for example, by committing to the 1.8bn Panel Pledge.
5. Advocating for integrating adolescent and youth interests and perspectives in policy and decision-making, including health, finance, security, gender, education, employment, climate justice, agriculture, and technology. This will ensure more cohesive and comprehensive programming and policymaking by government departments based on meaningful engagement of all stakeholders.
6. Engaging in public-private partnerships, especially with Youth-led organizations to co-create ambition loops that foster bold government policies and private sector leadership for the future of the world’s 1.8bn young people and that can fast-track new innovations and solutions for adolescent/youth health and wellbeing.
7. Champion the Agenda for Action for Adolescents among their peer groups and spheres of influence.

Business Leadership Guide to Deliver on the Seven Asks in the Agenda for Action for Adolescents

1. Providing vocational training and secondary/third-level education to ensure all adolescents and youth develop skills that align with modern labour market demands, protected by strengthened labour laws and policies to ensure meaningful careers and safe working environments.

Support

• Facilitate school-to-work transitions: Offer apprenticeships, trainee, student jobs and graduate programmes for young people to give them on-the-job opportunities to learn new skills, knowledge, and experiences that align with modern labour market demands.
• Work with schools and educational institutions to ensure that vocational training, secondary, and tertiary education programs are tailored for future labor markets, while ensuring that marginalized and vulnerable young people are equally included.

Protect / Ethical considerations

• Secure diversity and build on the principle of leaving no-one-behind for the above as part of the commitment to distributive justice, including opportunities for women in STEM, migrants, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable groups.

Do no harm

• Proactively work against child labour, poor and potentially harmful adolescent and youth jobs with a lack of opportunities for skills building, leadership development, and direct experience in critical areas, including in the supply chain.
• Ensure decent pay and working conditions.
  

Resources

• Promote the active use of The Global Initiative on Decent Jobs for Youth
• Global Consensus Statement on Meaningful Adolescent and youth Engagement (MAYE)

Accountability framework

2. Providing affordable, high-quality adolescent/youth health and well-being services through “one-stop shops”, digital platforms, and peer-led models that bring care closer, including through primary health-care services, schools, and community-based services

Support

• Develop and provide access to evidence-based, affordable, and high-quality adolescent health and well-being therapies, solutions, information, and services. Ensure age-appropriate digital platforms are accessible in terms of both infrastructure/technology and literacy, bringing care closer to young people where they are – including primary healthcare services, schools, and community-based offerings while taking into account parental consent and regulations when appropriate.
  

Protect / Ethical considerations

• Proactively work to address the most vulnerable groups of adolescents and youth so that such solutions, services, and platforms are accessible, affordable, and make a demonstrable difference to them.
• Protect the rights, including the right to informed consent in clinical trial work and digital rights of adolescents and youth, in how digital platforms are designed and data are collected, shared, presented, and used.
• Market such solutions, services, and digital platforms responsibly.
  

Do no harm

• Conduct a review (if relevant as part of a double materiality assessment) of the company’s commercial determinants of health with the objective of eliminating any negative impacts on child and adolescent health and well-being over a foreseeable timeframe.
  

Resources

• WHO Commercial Determinants of Health - WHO

Accountability framework

3. Ensuring mental well-being and resilience through the provision of timely and flexible access to evidence-based information, services, and therapy, including destigmatizing mental health conditions

Support

• Develop and provide access to evidence-based, affordable, high-quality mental health and well-being therapies, solutions, services, and support that are age-appropriate and respectful towards the lived experiences and articulated needs and wishes among young people with mental health conditions
• Enable a safe, healthy, inclusive, and respectful working environment for young people, including apprentices, trainees, students, and graduates, where they can be themselves
• Destigmatize mental health conditions in the workplace
• Work to protect and empower adolescents and youth in the digital environment
  

Protect / Ethical considerations

• Proactively work to address the most vulnerable groups of adolescents and youth so that such therapies, solutions, services, and support are accessible and make a demonstrable difference to them.
• Protect the rights, including the right to informed consent in clinical trial work and digital rights of adolescents and youth, in the way digital platforms are designed and data are collected and used
• Communicate respectfully about mental health conditions among young people in marketing and information campaigns

Do no harm

• Conduct mental health and well-being workplace assessments and engage young workers in the future of work, including how to build a healthy, inclusive, and flexible working environment where everyone can thrive
• For companies targeting adolescents and youth through their products, services, digital platforms, marketing, and communications – ensure that they do not contribute to harmful, negative, unrealistic images of what is the norm and the ideal and that they do not accept harmful, abusive commentary
  

Resources

• Adolescent Well-Being: A Definition and Conceptual Framework - PMNCH, BMJ

Accountability framework

4. Reforming harmful and punitive laws and instituting affirmative and protective legal and policy mechanisms to facilitate access to education, health care, social networks, safe public spaces, and other well-being services. These should include protection from all forms of violence, discrimination, and harm offline and online, sexual and gender-based violence, intimate partner violence, and domestic violence. Ensure age of consent laws do not deprive access to essential SRH services, including HIV testing, contraception, and safe abortion, while also protecting against child, early, and forced marriage.

Support

• Proactively advocate for young people’s equitable access to education, health care, social networks, safe public spaces, and other well-being services, and call out when their rights are violated in any form
• Apply the organization’s innovation capacity and core capabilities to support young people’s equitable access to the above

Protect / Ethical considerations

• Assess (for example, through Human Rights Due Diligence processes), how the business, across its entire value chain and its supply chain, can protect and support young people’s equitable access to education, health care, social networks, safe public spaces, work environments, and the protection from all forms of violence, discrimination and harm offline and online.
• Offer opportunities for making complaints safely and without risk of retaliation and for remedying action

Do no harm

• Assess if there are particularly vulnerable groups in the workplace, e.g., children, and/or supply chain, who are at risk of discrimination, abuse, and harm offline and online, and work to cultivate a safe and open environment with zero tolerance for any type of abuse, harmful behavior and discrimination
• Assess if there are women in the workplace or global supply chain that are at particular risk and in need of access to SRH services, including protected and fair maternity leaves.
  

Resources

• Business and Human Rights Principles - OHCHR
• EU Directive on Human Rights Due Diligence - EU Parliament
• Women’s Health and Empowerment in the Workplace - UNFPA

Accountability framework

5. Strengthening and establishing social protection mechanisms that meet the unique needs of adolescents and youth through income protection programmes, and safety nets for vulnerable adolescents, including cash, in-kind transfers, care services as well as access to adequate housing

Support

• Offer decent pay and social protection for young workers.
• Offer social security mechanisms for young workers in the gig and platform economy.
• Support financial literacy, agency, and empowerment among adolescents and youth.
• Support access to affordable and adequate housing, such as youth residences.
• Offer student discounts and other income-protecting measures for adolescents and youth, such as youth saving programmes
  

Protect / Ethical considerations

• Secure diversity and build on the principle of leaving no one behind: including opportunities for women in STEM, LGBTIQA+, migrants, ethnic minorities, disabled people, and other vulnerable groups.
• Offer safe, secure, and responsible payment products that are designed and suitable for adolescents and youth.
• Promote responsible spending.
  

Do no harm

• Ensure that adolescents and youth are regularly informed of their privacy and data protection rights as part of the use of payment apps and mobile wallets
• Ensure that the rights and interests of adolescents and youth are safeguarded in the area of e-commerce, quick loans, consumer credits, and other financial services (e.g., from short grace periods, high-interest rates, lack of technical support, high fees for late payment, among others)

Resources

• Business and Human Rights Principles
• EU Directive on Human Rights Due Diligence
• Women's Health and Empowerment in the Workplace

Accountability framework

6. Preventing stigma and discrimination against any adolescents and youth, irrespective of identity, background, and personal choices, through protection, awareness building, provision of Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) in all settings, and stakeholder sensitization

Support

• Foster a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Work to address unconscious bias, acknowledge the diversity of religious and cultural holidays, provide opportunities for people who are often facing stigma and discrimination, and encourage an environment where people can speak freely about their personal differences and be themselves.
• Sensitize the organization, including at the leadership level, how to prevent stigma and discrimination, including unconscious bias in job opportunities, promotions, and learning environments

Protect / Ethical considerations

• For companies targeting adolescents and youth through their products, services, digital platforms, marketing, and communications activities, ensure that product design, digital services, and their algorithms, marketing communication, and use of images do not contribute to unconscious bias, stigma, and discrimination.
• Offer opportunities for making complaints safely and without risk of retaliation and for remedying action
• Adopt a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of discrimination and stigmatization of vulnerable groups and individuals

Do no harm

• Conduct workplace assessments to identify if any groups feel discriminated against and take action to remedy.
• Assess if there are particularly vulnerable groups working anywhere in the supply chain that are discriminated against and take action, not remedy.
  

Resources

• Comprehensive Sexuality Education - WHO

Accountability framework

7. Strengthening the agency of adolescents and youth through providing meaningful social and civic participation and establishing accountability mechanisms to track the implementation of the Agenda for Action for Adolescents, utilizing existing mechanisms at the national, regional, and global levels, such as the Voluntary National Review and Universal Periodic Review

Support

• Meaningfully engage and empower adolescents and young people in all their diversity, to become agents of change, for example, by including them as rights holders and stakeholders to inform the organization’s long-term business and ESG strategies, targets and programmes.
• Offer opportunities for the participation of adolescents and young people – e.g., through consumer panels, and user groups, among others -  in the co-creation and design of new products, services, platforms, marketing, and communications campaigns that target or impact them and their peers
• Offer ‘reverse mentorships’ internally and facilitate that adolescents and youth have a seat at the table – for example, by signing-on to the 1.8bn Panel Pledge – securing the intergenerational diversity of perspectives and interests.
• Ensure fair remuneration for young people, with salaries determined by capacity, experience, and talent rather than age.

Protect / Ethical Considerations

• Ensure the diversity of views and needs by engaging the groups of adolescents and youth that may be at particular risk, are not often heard, or are discriminated against.
• Establish accountability mechanisms, such as the annual ESG reporting mechanism, and track and report on implementing the Agenda for Action for Adolescents yearly.
  

Do no harm

• Document how Human Rights Due Diligence processes and Double Materiality assessments proactively take into account and address the perspectives, interests, and rights of adolescents and youth

Resources

• Global Consensus Statement on Meaningful Youth Engagement (MAYE)

Accountability framework

Made in collaboration with:

Developed in consultation with AYC / AAA drafting group.

Annex 1

Description of accountability frameworks linked to the Agenda for Action for Adolescents 

United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) 

The UNGC provides the framework for companies to adopt a value system and a principles-based approach to doing business.This means operating in ways that, at a minimum, meet fundamental responsibilities in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption. Responsible businesses enact the same values and principles wherever they have a presence, and know that good practices in one area do not offset harm in another. The UN Global Compact Ten Principles are derived from several seminal declarations: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. Companies should incorporate the UNGC Ten Principles into their strategies, policies, and procedures to conduct responsible business and thereby drive long-term business resiliency in a changing world. Each of the UNGC's Ten Principles have been carefully evaluated and linked to a topic of interest within the PMNCH Agenda for Action for Adolescents. Each principle has a section titled 'What can companies do?' which can be further consulted by companies for more information.

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the roadmap to a sustainable future towards 2030. Led by the UN and supported by governments and organizations around the world, the SDGs garner collective action to tackle the world’s most pressing problems.  The private sector has a significant role to play in delivering on the 17 Global Goals, and their 169 targets. The SDG Compass is a useful resource developed by the Global Reporting Initiative in cooperation with the UN Global Compact to guide private sector transparency and accountability for the Global Goals. Companies can commit to relevant SDGs that are linked to their respective business operations and thereby establish secure tangible measures and targets to improve on. For this business leadership guide, each Ask has been linked to specific SDG metrics, which can be utilized by companies to enhance commitment and accountability.

Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)

The GRI puts forward reporting standards that are applicable across sectors and sustainability topics. It provides a common language for organizations to communicate and disclose their impact on people and environment and is widely applied by corporations when conducting their sustainability reports. Companies can use GRI's Topic Standards to disclose relevant environmental, social and governance information of their operations and value chain. Each of the standards has been consulted for the specific Ask in this Agenda for Action for Adolescents so that companies can incorporate relevant indicators in their annual reports and strategies to increase their commitment to this Agenda. 

Source / organization _ Topic 

• Standard
  • Disclosures / Goals / Targets
    • Requirement / Indicators

Annex 2

The 1.8bn Panel Pledge – In 2012, the Panel Pledge was initiated with the aim of significantly improving women's representation in public and professional forums. The consequences of gender imbalances in representation are far-reaching, impacting women in leadership, gender equality, organizational strategies, and opportunities in our community. While we have made progress, achieving gender parity remains a challenge, but it has now become a standard for most organizations.

Given the immense challenges facing planetary health, peace, and prosperity, the decisions and actions taken today will profoundly affect the future well-being of the world's largest-ever population of young people. To ensure that the global development agenda is co-created with and for the next generation, and as a step towards strengthening intergenerational justice, we are proud to launch the 1.8 Billion Panel Pledge. Our goal is to provide young people with more opportunities to influence the agenda and its outcomes, ensuring that every panel we assemble includes representation from young voices.

As the business constituency of PMNCH, we are committed to leading the charge in closing the youth deficit in critical conversations about their future, starting with our own employees and constituencies. We recognize the importance of young people's voices in elevating our ambitions and promoting greater accountability. Additionally, we understand that achieving far-reaching transformations will require active participation and leadership from young people, making partnerships across generations essential to inspiring innovative solutions.

Our key message is a call for active listening, authentic engagement, and meaningful involvement of and partnership with the world's 1.8 billion change-makers.