Tomorrow (17 November), the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council (PSC) and the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (UNPBC) are scheduled to hold their 8^th Annual Consultative Meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The consultative meeting will be co-chaired by Churchill Ewumbue-Monono, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Cameroon to the AU and Chairperson of the PSC for November 2025, and Ricklef Beutin, Permanent Representative of the Federal Republic of Germany to the UN and Chairperson of the UNPBC. Following the welcoming remark of the co-chairpersons, Bankole Adeoye, Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security and Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General to the AU and Head of the United Nations Office to the AU (UNOAU), are expected to make statements. It is the second time that the consultative meeting is being held since the decision of the PSC and the PBC during the 6^th Informal Annual Consultative Meeting held in November 2023, to elevate the annual informal consultation into a formal consultative meeting.

Convened during the AU Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Development (PCRD) Awareness Raising Week, taking place from 17 to 21 November, tomorrow’s session is expected to build on the 7^th consultative session. It is to be recalled that, the Joint Statement adopted during the last joint consultations, the 7^th Annual Consultative Meeting, emphasised the role of the PBC in convening stakeholders and garnering international support, as well as the role of the AU in implementing and advancing PCRD policy, noting that ‘strengthened cooperation between the AUC-PCRD in Cairo and the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, in the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (PBSO/DPPA), is essential for implementing the AU-UN MoU on Peacebuilding.’ The Pact for the Future, adopted at the Summit of the Future on 22 September 2024, inculcates renewed political momentum by reaffirming commitment to advancing peacebuilding efforts. The session also comes in the context of the 2025 Peacebuilding Architecture Review (PBAR), which offers a timely opportunity to both sharpen focus on operational effectiveness and measurable impact and to enhance close coordination between the AU and the UN in developing and implementing peacebuilding interventions in Africa.

Against the foregoing background, the first agenda item of the 8^th annual consultative meeting is the ‘Review of Collaborative Peacebuilding Efforts and Priorities.’ It is envisaged that the PSC and PSC Chair will take the lead in making a statement on this agenda item. This segment is expected to highlight the collaborative peacebuilding efforts of the AU and the PBC, as well as key achievements in peacebuilding and sustaining peace in Africa. It will pay particular attention to conflict prevention, sustainable financing and integration of peacebuilding with development priorities, particularly amid the ongoing 2025 PBAR. The PBAR is especially significant when viewed alongside the latest guiding multilateral frameworks, including the newly revised AUPCRD policy, the New Agenda for Peace and the Pact for the Future, which collectively call for more coherent and effective global governance approaches to conflict management. During the High-Level Dialogue on ‘Cultivating Consensus Towards a Common African Position on the 2025 Peacebuilding Architecture Review,’ the AU engaged in developing a set of recommendations for consideration in the development of the Common African Position (CAP) on the 2025 PBAR, ensuring Africa’s ownership and leadership in advancing the peacebuilding agenda. This was informed by regional consultations, including the ACCORD-DIRCO-UNPBSO forum of October 2024, in which discussions centred on establishing stronger links between the UN PBSO and regional and national mechanisms to enhance peacebuilding efforts.

The CAP developed and adopted by the PSC in 2020, as Africa’s contribution to the first Review of the UNPBA, identified twelve core peacebuilding priorities that continue to hold relevance today. These include managing transitions which assumed particular significance during the past few years; strengthening inclusive, resilient and responsive governance institutions; advancing transitional justice; preventing and countering terrorism and violent extremism; and ensuring sustainable financing for peacebuilding, among others. However, national peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction efforts are increasingly challenged by various, at times intersecting political transitions being pursued in a context mired by terrorism and violent extremism, rising debt distress and cost of living, institutional fragility, breakdown of state-society relations, contested legitimacy of governments,  pandemics, rising geopolitical fragmentation and tension and the escalating impacts of climate change. As a result, support to African countries emerging from conflict or navigating complex transitions must be planned and developed to address these interconnected pressures within and as part of a political settlement rather than just as a technical process. It is therefore essential that the current review of the UNPBA reflects and integrates these priority concerns into its deliberations.

The second agenda item focuses on Youth – linkages between development and Peacebuilding. Under this agenda item, it is envisaged that the PSC and the African Union Youth Ambassador for Peace (AYAP) will make the presentation. It is expected that the PBC will also give an update on youth engagement in the Peacebuilding Architecture. In the previous Annual Joint Consultations between the two bodies, both bodies underscored ‘the importance of the Youth Peace and Security Agenda and to leverage the AU’s Youth Decade Plan of Action and the PBC’s Strategic Action Plan on Youth and Peacebuilding to promote the inclusion of youth in peacebuilding efforts, including by building their capacities, skills and livelihoods to actively contribute to sustaining peace and development.’ This focus on youth comes at a time when Generation Z (GenZ) protests have become recurrent, highlighting the growing disenchantment of the majority youthful population on the continent with the state of governance and economic opportunities.  As highlighted in our analysis of the PSC’s 1310^th session on YPS and migration held early in the month, increasing youth migration and the entanglement of migration with various threats to peace and security is another manifestation of the discontent with the pervasive development and governance deficits in various parts of the continent. These clearly indicate the need for systematic peacebuilding interventions that address the twin challenges of development and governance deficits stunting opportunities for youth.

The PBC’s presentation is expected to highlight its involvement in initiatives such as the Africa Regional Consultation for the Second Independent Progress Study on YPS, mandated by Action 20 of the Pact for the Future. This forum provided a platform to highlight new narratives and contributions that young people are making in peace processes. Moreso, the Peacebuilding Support Office, together with partners, commissioned the 2025 Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) Thematic Review on Youth, Peace and Security (YPS), which highlights best practices and lessons from 41 PBF-funded projects across 33 countries (2018 – 2022). The review outlines how these initiatives expanded opportunities for youth participation in decision-making by supporting youth councils, strengthening stakeholder dialogue and fostering youth networks and YPS linkages, which also contributed to the development of National Action Plans and other national strategies on YPS.

The third and last agenda item of the 8^th consultative meeting is a discussion on ‘Peacebuilding Initiatives in South Sudan, Sahel countries and the Lake Chad Basin.’ The fragile political and security situation in those areas has compelled the AU to intensify its efforts to respond effectively. Since early 2025, the PSC has intensified its engagement on the situation in South Sudan in response to escalating political and security instability. Since clashes erupted in March between the South Sudan People’s Defence Forces (SSPDF) and armed groups linked to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO), a recent Amani Africa briefing to the UNSC on the situation in South Sudan highlighted that the fragile peace established under the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) is in grave peril and the country is on the cusp of relapsing back to full-scale war. For pursuing meaningful peacebuilding, the briefing emphasized that the downward spiral to full-scale conflict should be arrested through robust and prompt preventive diplomacy; measures that restore commitment of the parties to the 2018 peace agreement such as dialogue should be urgently implemented; and support to the work of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), particularly in enhancing protection of civilians and advancing sub-national peacemaking and peacebuilding efforts should be sustained.

The situation in the Sahel countries epitomises the challenges to peacebuilding efforts in political transition taking place in a context of violent extremism and conflict involving terrorist groups and a geopolitical context of absence of trust and broken regional and international relationships. As highlighted in the edition of Insight on the PSC for the informal consultation with countries in transition held on 13 November, pursuing the transition process for restoration of constitutional order (and by extension peacebuilding activities) cannot be separated from and need to be part of a wider stabilization and state authority expansion strategy backed by a security mechanism they develop and deploy together with the Sahel countries to address the existential threat facing these countries.

Finally, in the Lake Chad Basin (LCB), despite the sustained efforts being deployed by the LCB Commission and the MNJTF, Boko Haram remains an existential threat to peace and security in the area and the wider region. The gravity of this threat has not diminished, and the MNJTF has not been able to break this status quo. At the same time, the emergence of developments weakening the MNJTF and persisting vulnerabilities due to climate, security and governance fragilities are fast bringing the MNJTF to a turning point. Yet, given the important contribution of the stabilisation strategy for the region, the challenge is how to scale up peacebuilding interventions and expand the nature and focus of such interventions in the region.

The expected outcome is a joint statement. The two bodies are expected to encourage Member States to integrate peacebuilding and social cohesion into their National Development Strategies, emphasising strong national ownership and leadership, as well as the inclusive participation of all segments of society, particularly women and youth. The meeting is also likely to reiterate the urge for international partners, including in the UN System, as well as international and regional financial institutions, to align and coordinate their peacebuilding-related efforts in Africa, with nationally led peacebuilding, regionally and continentally supported efforts, with particular emphasis on addressing the twin challenges of development and governance deficits triggering youth protests and migration. The two bodies are also likely to stress the importance of effective partnership and cooperation, including with the regional and sub-regional organisations, to improve coordination and cooperation in peacebuilding, and increase synergies to ensure the coherence and complementarity of such efforts. The AUPSC and UNPBC are also expected to highlight the importance of political commitment on the part of national political actors and authorities and the need for pursuing peacebuilding as part of a political settlement that has solid support from various sectors of society and all political and social forces, including the youth and women.