Supporting Civic Surges

How Accountability Lab is supporting Gen Z movements

The moment

Gen Z has proven it can mobilize. Since 2022, young people have driven governments from power in Nepal and Bangladesh, forced a finance bill to be withdrawn in Kenya, and driven constitutional debates from Sri Lanka to Morocco. Along the way, the definition of civic action has expanded.

What happens after these initial civic surges is far less settled.

Looking across these contexts, and at our own work in Nepal, four patterns are worth naming for us. They are not laws, and it’s important to note that none of them describes any single movement fully:

Vacuums filled badly. In Madagascar the military filled the gap. In Bangladesh, older parties were reconstituted and returned.

Protest without infrastructure. Movements that show strength on the streets often lack the evidence, legal knowledge and negotiating capacity to hold governments to account after the moment passes.

Invited in, kept out. Young leaders win an election or drive a transition, then find that the real decisions still happen in rooms they cannot participate in.

Concessions without change. A bill is withdrawn, or a promise is made, but then it’s business as usual – often within a matter of months.

If there is a common thread, it is that the harder problem is not mobilization but what comes after it.

“We sometimes look at the movement as a two-day movement. But the movement continues – that’s something that I think a lot of us don’t see or acknowledge.”

Monika Niroula, CIVIC organizer, NEPAL

What we are trying to be

We are not an INGO that arrived after Nepal’s transition with a framework to offer. Accountability Lab is a translocal network of locally registered, locally led organisations. AL Nepal had been active in the country for almost 15 years before the protests began.

We do not lead Gen Z movements. We do not speak for them. We do not want to become an institutional home that makes them dependent on us. What we try to offer is narrower:

We do not always get the balance right. The line between facilitating and steering is thinner than it looks, particularly when our own staff become closely associated with a transition. We would rather name that than pretend it is solved.

The role matters because it has been left empty. As Aayush Basyal, a participant in Nepal’s movement, points out, during the People’s Movement twenty years ago civil society acted as a third party that brought political parties to the table and held government and citizens accountable to each other. That role went largely unfilled in 2025.

“Their dysfunction cost the state a lot. … the concept of civil society has to be redefined and then reintroduced to the people. It’s a very important part of how society works.”

Aayush Basyal, Gen Z movement participant, Nepal

Bridging the gap: putting young people in front

Through 2026 we have been running Bridging the Gap, a campaign built around interviews with movement participants from Nepal to Kenya. It is not a retrospective. It has five aims:

• Legitimise youth-led civic action as real political participation, not a phase, a disruption, or a stand-in for institutional engagement.
• Platform young changemakers, from inside our network and well beyond it.
• Track the “after” — what happens to a movement once the protest moment ends, and whether it becomes a durable civic structure.
• Draw out practical lessons for governments, youth councils, ministries of youth and CSOs on what genuine inclusion might actually require.
• Build a resource organisers, funders and institutions can use, not just a story we tell about ourselves.

Sahara and Prince run SpeakUpNepal, a project that’s been grown and amplified during Prince’s participation in the Lab’s Civic Charge incubator for civic activists. It’s an e-petition platform that funnels citizen concerns to the relevant government departments. Departments now sometimes request petitions on specific bills to understand public opinion before proceeding. That is the bridge working.

What we are learning (so far)

These come from one country over one cycle.

Trust seems to work as infrastructure. It does not appear to be something that can be built during a crisis. Physical space, consistency and showing up beforehand are what made rapid support possible later.

The movement does not end when the news cycle does. Most support is designed around the protest moment. The work that decides the outcome happens afterwards, and it is the least funded part.

Participation is uneven, and proximity to main urban areas distorts it. Travel costs, connectivity and lack of exposure to civic spaces quietly filter out young people who should be central. When closeness to Kathmandu decides whose vision becomes the movement’s official story, representation suffers.

Listen first, then support what is asked for. Monika Niroula’s ask of partners is the right question, and it is a discipline rather than a slogan.

Neutral convening has limits, and we should say so. Gen Z movements are political actors. We hold the space. We do not hold a position on who should win.

What we do not know yet

We would rather publish these than pretend we have answers.

• The Gen Z council under consideration in Nepal appears to be emerging organically. We do not know whether that is replicable elsewhere, or what conditions allow such a structure to form without being imposed.
• We do not have a good answer for how to accompany movements that have deliberately rejected organizational structures and have no single interlocutor.
• Intergenerational bridging keeps coming up as necessary. We do not yet know how to do it without older allies sliding into the role of patron rather than partner.
• Micro-grants and income support work at small scale in one country. What they look like across several countries, and what funding mechanisms that needs, needs further collaborative work.
• We do not know how to demonstrate trust to funders without reducing it to a metric that damages the thing being measured.
• Where governments conceded but did not change, as in Kenya and Indonesia, we are not clear what sustained engagement should look like when the conditions that produced the protest remain intact.

What we are not doing

This is not about instrumentalising protest for donor visibility. It is not youth advisory panels without influence. It is not treating Gen Z as a single bloc with one agenda. It is not a short project deliverable.

We work alongside and through proximate organisations, not instead of them. What we can add is the cross-regional connective tissue, the fiscal infrastructure and the convening space that a single-country organization is rarely able to build alone.


Watch our series of interviews with Gen Z civic activists and reformers below.