From Blueprint to Action: A Stakeholder Panel on Co-Designing Youth-Led Coastal Resilience in Africa

How do we transform a good project idea into a resilient, scalable, and community-owned reality? This session presents a live case study in co-design. We bring together the key architects and critical stakeholders of the Coastal Resilience Academy—a groundbreaking initiative to certify Ghanaian coastal youth as flood risk assessors using the FLOODLABEL toolkit—for a candid, forward-looking dialogue. Instead of a finished report, we present a pre-launch blueprint. Our panel—comprising the German research partner who developed the toolkit, the Ghanaian University Youth leading the adaptation, the local government planner tasked with implementation, and the community leader who must trust it—will dissect this blueprint from their unique vantage points. The session will move beyond theory to grapple with practical questions of trust, governance, scale, and ethical co-production. Attendees will witness the very process of bridging epistemic cultures and sectors, leaving with a tested framework for designing their own collaborative sustainability innovations.