In the current era of peak youth, young people’s voices and authentic participation are needed more than ever. This article focuses on how youth participation in research can enhance wider understanding of young people’s experiences, perspectives and solutions, while also empowering young people. There is an established tradition of engaging young people and children with the qualitative research process, ranging from youth focussed research to youth-led participatory action research. Within this we occupy a middle ground, arguing for the need to create heterotopic spaces for participation in which both young researchers and professional researchers learn from one another’s expertise. Mindful of the roadblocks to authentic participation, this article systematically approaches engaging young people at six critical stages in the research process, namely: setting the framework; question design; data collection; analysis; validation; and sharing results for discussion and action. Youth co-research offers methodological rigour grounded in a reconceptualization of where expertise can be found, a committed approach to research training and youth empowerment, greater access to hard-to-reach groups of young people and data validity built upon close engagement with young researchers. To demonstrate our approach, we share in this article three youth co-research case studies, which focus on young people experiencing climate change disruptions in Uganda, young people impacted by COVID-19 in Indonesia and Nepal and a youth think tank convened between East, West and Southern Africa. The rigour and value of youth-engaged qualitative methodologies can benefit young people, as well as the academics, policymakers and NGOs with whom they work.

We explore how the government’s messaging on COVID-19 pandemic response perpetuated mistrust and impeded people’s ability to access and utilise sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services. While the need for SRH information increased, public health messages fostered mistrust in sexual and reproductive health services. We draw on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions conducted among women, girls, and healthcare providers in five African countries (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda) between May and October 2021. We show how trust was largely eroded through preventive measures, such as stay-at-home directives, social distancing, curfews, and lockdowns. We argue that, on one hand, while state-led epidemic preparedness and response were geared towards the common good, i.e., controlling the virus, on the other hand, de-prioritisation of much-needed services for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), as well as a lack of transparency among some of the service providers, bred mistrust in healthcare. We conclude that ambiguity in communication and implementation of COVID-19 prevention measures further compromised access to and utilisation of sexual and reproductive health services.