Amplifying girls’ voices and visibility has been highlighted as a key approach both to ensure programming aims to meet their needs, and to increase young people’s voice, agency and participation in decisions that affect their lives – both as individuals and collectively. To date, however, there is limited evidence on how much funding is currently invested in adolescent-and youth-led organisations.

This brief explores data on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Creditor Reporting System (OECD-CRS) in order to estimate how much official development assistance (ODA) goes towards adolescent-and youth-led organisations. Our findings show that in 2021, only $87 million of ODA focused on gender and adolescents provided by the top 10 bilateral donors went to programming that had an adolescent- or youth-led component, a very slight increase from the amount provided in 2020 ($84 million). This is around 1% of all gender and adolescent-targeted ODA. This suggests that there is an urgent need for further research and evaluations to understand the effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability of the funding that is channelled directly to adolescent girls and girl-and-youth-led organisations, and to measure progress over time.