1. Give young people something real to own 

Consulting young people is the easy part, but it rarely yields lasting results on its own. Youth can sense the difference between genuine empowerment and a box being ticked, and the Ivorian team built the whole programme around making sure they felt meaningfully engaged. Participants were given real responsibility, real resources and genuine access to decision makers. As Jean-Paul Aka, who leads UNDP Côte d'Ivoire's Sustainable Development and Climate Change Unit, describes the approach, "the Gnambêlê model works because young people are not invited to listen, they are invited to create, to challenge, to propose and to lead." That sense of ownership deepened through the designation of young people as UNDP Biodiversity Champions – a role that carried a public commitment before their peers and their community.

2. Take youth into the ecosystems themselves 

The Bootcamp's guided immersion in the Bingerville Botanical Garden was a grounding experience for many of them, as it was the first time they had encountered invasive alien species with their own eyes and understood the damage those species do to native ecosystems. Abdoul Nasser, a Technical Assistant with UNDP Côte d'Ivoire supporting the implementation of the BES-Net project, explains it best: "There is no substitute for physical immersion in the ecosystems you are trying to protect. When young people walk through a forest, identify species, touch the soil and see invasive species with their own eyes, the connection to nature becomes personal and permanent." An in-person field visit can impact people in a way classroom sessions rarely do, and it is often where a general concern or vague awareness of an issue turns into a personal stake. 

3. Build the work on culture 

Across much of Africa, story, music and image are how knowledge has always travelled, so the team made creative expression a core pillar of the Bootcamp rather than an evening's entertainment. Theatre, slam poetry, documentary screenings and an art competition gave participants a way to feel the issues and then express them in their own voices. When young people become the authors of the narrative rather than its audience, their work can reach communities in a more authentic and organic way than an official campaign could. 

4. Connect the work to live policy moments 

Building young people's energy and then leaving it with nowhere to feed into can do more harm than good. Côte d'Ivoire avoided that by aligning the Bootcamp with active national processes that were under revision at the time. As Jean-Paul Aka explains, "If you train young people but give them nowhere to channel their energy and ideas, you create frustration instead of impact. We deliberately aligned the Bootcamp with the CDN 3.0 and NBSAP revision processes so that youth contributions had a concrete destination." Participants arrived prepared, having trained in policy analysis and negotiation, and their contributions on youth employment, digital biodiversity monitoring and the role of Indigenous and local knowledge were included in the official texts – a first for the country. 

5. Plan for what comes after the youth engagement event 

A successful one-off event usually changes very little, and the team’s advice is to design against that from the start. The activities of the Bootcamp were built to bring young people together and keep them connected beyond the camp, so that the cohort could become a living network rather than a group that met for a week, were trained individually and went home. With follow-up activities, regional focal points, mentoring and seed funding for the strongest projects, participants were then equipped to take what they had learned back to their own communities and put it into practice.