In all of West Africa, te voting age is 18, but presidential eligibility ages vary widely
Originally published on Global Voices
Youth mobilized in Africa. Screenshot from DW Africa's YouTube channel
In West Africa, young people can vote for the first time at 18. In some states, they are eligible to serve in parliament by age 25. However, depending on the country, they must wait until they are 35, 40, or even 50 years old before being eligible to run for the highest office. Although these age limits are beginning to shift, the real challenges often lie deeper in the electoral structure.
Young people are deemed mature enough to elect their leaders, yet not to replace them. They drive political movements forward by voting, advocating, campaigning, and protesting, yet cannot run for office themselves. The question is, can democracy really be called inclusive when it gives young people the right to elect but not to be elected?
Age: A shifting barrier
Across the region, the voting age is 18. However, presidential eligibility ages vary widely. In Gambia, it’s 30; in Senegal, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire, it’s 35; and in Benin, Ghana, and Guinea, it’s 40. In the legislative assemblies, the bar is even lower. In Togo, Benin, Senegal, and Nigeria’s House of Representatives, it’s 25, while in Ghana it’s 21.
The situation in Togo requires closer inspection. On May 6, 2024, the country legally became a parliamentary republic. Under the 2024 Constitution, the eligibility age for President of the Republic is 50. Parliament also now elects the president, whose powers are limited. Authority now rests with the President of the Council of Ministers, who must be at least 40 and is not elected in public presidential elections. Faure Gnassingbé has held this position since May 3, 2025, the day parliament also elected the country’s oldest-ever incoming president of the Republic, Jean-Lucien Savi de Tové, 86.
However, the country’s legal age limit is hardly set in stone. In 2002, the National Assembly lowered it from 45 to 35 — a reform the opposition called tailor-made for Faure Gnassingbé.
More recently, in Ghana’s capital, Accra, on July 30, 2026, the Ghanaian government agreed in principle to lower the minimum presidential eligibility age from 40 to 35, defying the Constitutional Review Committee’s recommendation of 30. This legislation will ultimately go to a referendum, requiring a 40 percent turnout and a 75 percent approval.
In 2018, Nigeria set a regional precedent. Under pressure from the youth-led Not Too Young To Run campaign, the law lowered the presidential eligibility age from 40 to 35 and the House of Representatives’ eligibility age from 30 to 25.
According to data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union, lowering the minimum presidential age leads to younger parliaments. However, Côte d’Ivoire tells a very different story. In 2016, after removing the maximum age limit of 75 to run for office, incumbent President Alassane Ouattara, 83, ran for another term in 2025. The law rarely protects younger generations.
Youths particularly active in street movements
Even though young people have the right to vote across the continent, that does not mean all young people exercise that right. In August 2025, an Afrobarometer survey found that those aged 18 to 35 were less active than their elders in almost all traditional means of political participation. Overall across the continent, they trailed by 18 percentage points in voting, but by a record 29 points in Senegal. Protests were the only exception.
In Togo’s capital of Lomé, the June 6 Movement, sparked by the rapper Aamron’s arrest, brought thousands of people onto the streets. According to the Media Foundation for West Africa, the subsequent crackdown, for which the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) blamed government-backed militiamen, left seven dead.
Similarly, in Madagascar, the September 2025 protests toppled President Andry Rajoelina’s government, resulting in a military takeover. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the overthrown president himself came to power in 2019 on the back of a protest, at just 34 years old.
Comparably, in Kenya, street protests forced the withdrawal of the 2024 Finance Bill. Meanwhile, in Morocco, youth-led protests prompted the authorities to announce youth candidacy incentives and prosecute specific ringleaders.
Although leaderless movements wrest concessions, they rarely last without political parties or trade unions to sustain them.
The gap between participation and representation
The Inter-Parliamentary Report, published on April 9, 2026, found that elected officials aged 30 and under account for just 2.8 percent of all parliamentarians worldwide. Since 2023, progress has stalled for the first time since 2014. More than a third (37.1 percent) of legislative houses have no parliamentarians in this age group.
The lack of youth representation and participation is a significant challenge considering young people under 35 account for roughly 70 percent of West Africa’s population, according to the West Africa Youth Democracy Conference.
According to data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), at the start of Ghana’s 2025 parliamentary term, despite the legal minimum age of 21, no parliamentarians were aged 30 or under. What’s more, those aged 31 to 40 held just 46 of the 269 parliamentary seats, or 17.1 percent. After Senegal’s 2024 legislative elections, the National Assembly had only five members under 30, accounting for just 3 percent. Although almost 38 percent of registered voters were aged 18 to 35, the Assembly’s average age was 47. Elected at just 44, the country’s youngest-ever president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, only became an official candidate after his mentor, Ousmane Sonko, was disqualified.
In Nigeria, International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that supports sustainable democracy worldwide, reported that in 2015, only three of the 360 members of the House of Representatives were between the ages of 18–25, rising to 14 in 2019 — a positive but modest development.
In Dakar, the head of Yiaga Africa, the organization behind the Not Too Young to Run campaign, summed up the situation, stating that the political arena is more open on paper than in reality.
However, Afrobarometer has identified a paradox. While young people do vote less than their elders, they are also excluded from seats of power and the polls. This representation gap is anything but passive; it breeds disengagement. The IPU warns that young people’s absence from parliamentary assemblies undermines institutional legitimacy and jeopardizes trust in democracy. Senegal, listed in the 2026 IPU report as one of the countries where parliament grew younger in the most recent elections, shows that rejuvenation is possible when a political agenda empowers a generation.
Rewriting the deal: money, parties, obstacles
High age limit proponents demand experience. Across the 34 countries that Afrobarometer surveyed, citizens favor an average leadership age of 39. Those calling for a lower age limit seek proven engagement measures, such as lowering the eligibility age, quotas, and forums for young parliamentarians. However, as Nigeria shows, often, the main obstacle is financial.
Nigeria’s ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), has set the total cost of its 2027 presidential nomination and expression-of-interest forms at NGN 100 million (USD 75,000), NGN 30 million (USD 22,521) for the expression of interest, and NGN 70 million (USD 52,550) for the nomination. The Senate will cost NGN 20 million (USD 15,014) and the House of Representatives NGN 10 million (USD 7,507).
Young people will receive a 50 percent discount only on nomination fees, leaving the presidential bill at NGN 65 million (USD 48,789). A Nigerian civil society group calculated that workers earning the minimum wage, NGN 70,000 (USD 52) per month, would have to work for more than a century to buy some of these forms.
The Electoral Act, 2026, signed on February 18, also doubled the presidential candidate’s campaign spending limit to NGN 10 billion (USD 7.5 million) and tripled that of governorship candidates to NGN 3 billion (USD 2.2 million).
At the initiative of ECOWAS and the youth-led advocacy organization Legis360, delegates from 12 countries gathered in Dakar to bring these obstacles to the forefront. In their communiqué, they launched the West Africa Youth Observer Network (WAYON) and called for youth quotas, reduced candidate fees, and spending limits. ECOWAS later announced it would deploy youth-only election observers for Nigeria’s upcoming presidential election on January 16, 2027.
Other countries exemplify how laws can directly impact nominations. According to the IPU, Ecuador owes much of its progress to a 2022 law, which required 25 percent of its candidates to be young adults. Countries with term limits also have considerably more young parliamentarians than the global average. In 2023, the IPU also noted that limited youth funding and a lack of spending limits contributed to aging parliamentary assemblies.
Elsewhere, the obstacles are political. Take, for example, Benin. After disqualifying the main opposition candidate (Les Démocrates) for failing to meet election requirements, current President Romuald Wadagni faced only one opponent (Paul Hounkpe). On April 12, 2026, Wadagni subsequently won the presidential election with 94.27 percent of the vote. In 2024, a constitutional reform that extended the presidential term from five to seven years also raised the minimum vote threshold for securing seats in the National Assembly from 10 percent of parliamentary election votes to 20 percent. This regulation far outweighs a candidate’s date of birth when they have no party machine behind them.
Another example is Burkina Faso. In January 2026, the military junta dissolved all political parties. Meanwhile, in The Gambia, President Barrow will run for a third term in the December 5 presidential election.
Inclusive voting, but flawed representation
Is a system that gives young people the right to elect their leader but impedes their ability to become one themselves fully inclusive? The findings speak for themselves. Although Nigeria has lowered its age limits and Ghana has committed to doing the same, these limits are more a symptom than a cause. Age is not the sole contributing factor.
Critics argue that lowering age limits without also addressing nomination costs, party regulations, and the openness of the political arena would only be the first step on a seemingly endless staircase. What stands between young people and decision-making positions are exceedingly high costs, restrictive nomination practices, candidate exclusions, and even the lack of parties.
Until street movements have credible institutional representatives, they will continue to wrest temporary concessions or, as seen in Madagascar, give way to powers other than those they had hoped for. The primary challenge of the West African Democratic Pact is making young people not only the promised future of politics, but also an active part of today’s representation.
