Shared Power in Practice: Young Women Are Already Leading

A young woman in Bangladesh learns that a child marriage is about to take place.

She does not wait for someone else to intervene. She calls 999.

The authorities arrive. The wedding is stopped.

This story captures what RiseUp! Asia Pacific is about in 2026 in a way no introduction about innovation or impact ever could.

Because this is not about whether young women have leadership potential. It is about what happens when their leadership is trusted, resourced and taken seriously. It is about young women acting now: in their communities, in research, in advocacy, and in the decisions that shape what comes next.

Not young women preparing to lead one day.

Young women leading now.

Between March 2025 and February 2026, World YWCA’s RiseUp! Young Women’s Leadership and Advocacy Initiative in Asia and the Pacific, supported by the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), directly engaged 2,530 young women, supported by around 110 Master Trainers, across 69 communities. Young women led 37 local advocacy campaigns, while approximately 15,000 young women participated through safe spaces, advocacy, and community dialogue.

The numbers matter. But they are not the heart of the story.

The heart of the story is power.

This is not power as branding or as a panel theme. This is power as something real: who gets to act, who gets resourced, who gets believed, who defines what counts as evidence, and who still has to ask for permission.

Across RiseUp!, World YWCA’s Our Spaces, Power Spaces: Safe Spaces Guide helps create the conditions for young women to speak, participate, build relationships, understand their rights, and see themselves differently. One 18-year-old participant in Nepal put it plainly: “The most important thing I have learned here is about safe space, that I could recognise that I’m the safe space for myself.”

RiseUp! doesn’t treat confidence as the finish line.

Confidence leads to participation. Participation leads to leadership. Leadership leads to advocacy. Advocacy begins to change the structures around young women.

A safe space, then, isn’t a retreat from political change. It’s where the real work of change begins.

Across 1,787 Knowledge, Attitude and Perception surveys, knowing where to access sexual and reproductive health services rose from 60.0% to 82.8%, while knowing where to seek help for violence rose from 65.5% to 85.1%. These shifts move beyond general awareness towards practical pathways for action and protection.

From confidence to action.

That is why this year’s story is increasingly about what happens after the workshop. 

The RiseUp! Guide for Young Women’s Transformative Leadership and Advocacy builds knowledge and skills, but young women decide what those tools need to become in their own communities.

In Bangladesh, that looked like a young woman stopping a child marriage. As she put it: “I called the 999 for violence against women and child, and they came to stop the wedding. I stand against where there is injustice. I protest against it.”

Across Bangladesh, young women also used street theatre to promote GBV helplines, worked with schools to create safer environments and advance sexual and reproductive health and rights, and opened conversations on issues often pushed into silence. In India, young women in Halmari Tea Estate worked with shopkeepers and village elders to stop tobacco sales to minors, while young women in Nandgram wrote directly to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi about sanitation and hygiene.

In Nepal, young women took advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and menstrual hygiene beyond the training room, building relationships with Ward Presidents, Ward Members and Ward Secretaries across six communities. The work strengthened local coordination and created clearer pathways for young women to bring the issues affecting them directly to local decision-makers.

In Myanmar, where conflict shapes what public advocacy can safely look like, young women used local trainings and dialogues to create space around SRHR, psychosocial support and mental health across nine communities. The form changed with the context, but the principle did not: young women creating space, sharing knowledge and acting where they could.

In Thailand, young women brought climate advocacy into an intergenerational space through The Earth Is Calling – Take Action Now, bringing students, parents, faculty and community members into the same conversation. And they didn’t show up just as participants they were deeply involved in co-creating the session and holding the space for transformation work to take place.

This is what locally led advocacy looks like: not speaking for communities, but creating the conditions for communities to speak and act for themselves.

But action needs resources.

And if we are serious about shared power, leadership without resources is still containment.

In Sri Lanka, when Cyclone Ditwah displaced communities and disrupted planned advocacy, young women adapted. A RiseUp! microgrant supported menstrual hygiene sessions and dignity kits in cyclone-affected communities, connecting climate justice to clean water, privacy, health and safety.

In Papua New Guinea, RiseUp!’s micro-funding model through the Hauskuk Initiative put money directly into the hands of young women. They identified the issues affecting their communities, from sexual and reproductive health and rights to sexual and gender-based violence, teenage pregnancy and mental health, and then designed their own responses.

Sometimes sharing power is very literal.

It means providing money.

Small grants may look insignificant on a spreadsheet. But placed directly in the hands of local leaders, they become trust, experimentation and the ability to act without waiting for permission. One young woman from Yabob described the shift clearly: “At first, I used to be too shy to stand up and speak. But now, I feel free to stand up, gather the girls together, and talk with them to share ideas.”

And that principle is beginning to travel further across the Pacific. In Solomon Islands, RiseUp! began a micro-funding pilot in Honiara, adapting lessons from Papua New Guinea and moving resources closer to young women themselves. It is early work, but the direction matters: ideas move differently when money can move with them.

Representation is not enough.

Shared power is also about who gets to shape knowledge, spaces and decisions.

Too often, institutions still behave as though communities are useful for stories, but not for analysis. Useful for testimony, but not for judgements about how change happens. Useful to be consulted, but not to decide what the findings mean.

Through World YWCA’s Feminist Consultation Methodology, young women are co-researchers, analysts and meaning-makers. In the RiseUp! Formative Learning Evaluation, 23 young women co-researchers across seven countries facilitated focus group discussions with 152 alumnae and conducted a survey with 412 additional alumnae. They co-analysed the data and co-led country-level sensemaking.

Young women were not simply asked whether the programme worked for them. They were involved in deciding what change looks like, what the evidence means and which stories matter.

That same politics runs through RiseUp!’s work on disability inclusion. In India, 116 Deaf young women across Kolkata, Bangalore and Jaipur participated in leadership and advocacy activities, while the RiseUp! Young Women’s Guide for Transformative Leadership was adapted into Indian Sign Language videos. In Nepal, materials were translated into Braille. Deaf co-researchers in India are also helping shape more accessible SRHR resources for their own communities.

That is accessibility by design, not accessibility as an afterthought.

Participating in activities is different from being able to shape the outcomes. Access is not simply getting through the door. It is having the information, safety, resources and authority to influence what happens once you are inside.

This same commitment shapes RiseUp!’s approach to intergenerational leadership, guided by World YWCA’s The Intergenerational Triangle: A Guide to Shared Leadership.

Intergenerational work is about more than bringing different generations into the same room. It is about practising shared leadership now, rather than promising power later.

And the work is not finished.

Young women still describe being seen as too young to lead without endorsement from older colleagues, or being trusted to deliver programmes publicly while holding less influence over budgets, governance or strategy.

Access is political.

Sharing power follows RiseUp! Asia Pacific onto global stages too. Having a seat at the table does not guarantee meaningful participation.

Visa systems, travel costs, language, funding and institutional design still shape who gets to arrive, who gets heard and who can meaningfully influence an agenda.

If global institutions want young women’s leadership, the burden cannot stay on young women to overcome structures that were not designed for their participation.

As RiseUp! Asia Pacific moves through the final year of Phase IV, this is not a time to wind down. It is a time to put learning to work through stronger country advocacy roadmaps and co-created tools and approaches on climate justice, language and power, disability inclusion, safeguarding and adolescent participation. The new RiseUp! Peace, Conflict and Justice Module carries that same approach into some of the most urgent questions young women are navigating today.

All shaped with young women, not for them.

Here’s the real bottom line: young women do not need institutions to manufacture their leadership. What they need are systems that see it, back it, and are actually willing to be changed by it.

From a young woman stopping child marriage in Bangladesh, to Deaf young women reshaping access to SRHR information in India, to young women in Papua New Guinea deciding how money should be used in their own communities, RiseUp! is showing what happens when participation becomes authority.

And that authority travels. At CSW69 in New York, World YWCA brought together an intergenerational delegation of more than 85 representatives, including over 30 young women leaders. RiseUp! young women were not there simply to be represented. Alice Sajjan brought research she had co-facilitated with girls in Bangladesh to the launch of the Girls’ Vision for Education with Malala Fund. Teeraporn Sutakul brought her experience of intergenerational leadership in RiseUp! Thailand to a global panel on gender equality and later to the World Service Council Luncheon as a keynote speaker. Both also facilitated safe spaces for CSW delegates on issues including inclusion, mental health and financial justice.

That is what the journey from local to global should look like: not extracting young women’s stories to carry into global spaces, but creating the conditions for young women to carry their own knowledge, evidence and leadership into them. Local leadership did not stay local. It entered the rooms where global agendas are shaped.

Not the promise of power later.
Shared power, in practice, now.