Across the Global South, youth mentoring occupies a curious position. It is simultaneously ubiquitous in lived experience yet marginal in formal systems.
Young people routinely encounter guidance relationships—through extended family networks, teachers, older peers, and community figures. Yet within education policy and school-to-work transition systems, mentoring has often been incorporated without the level of design and rigor required for it to function as a core developmental mechanism. This disconnect becomes increasingly consequential as countries grapple with fragile school-to-work pathways and persistent gender inequities.
These realizations formed the backdrop for conversations among practitioners and researchers working across India, Vietnam, and Uganda at the Mentoring Summit India. We were brought together through the Echidna Global Scholars Program at Brookings and supported by its Collaborative Research and Impact Fund. Despite differing institutional contexts, a shared proposition emerged to understand the principles of mentoring that should shape the future of this work.
Understanding mentoring: A relationship, program, system
To better understand mentoring’s role, it is useful to examine how it operates across three nested levels.
First, mentoring is a relationship. Built on trust, mutuality, and empathy, mentoring often emerges organically within social structures. Many young people experience mentoring long before participating in formal initiatives: an aunt who advises, a senior student who guides, a teacher who advocates. These relationships are neither standardized nor evenly distributed, yet they form a crucial layer of social support.
Second, mentoring appears in a programmatic form. Civil society organizations, schools, and workforce initiatives structure mentoring to address specific challenges, including academic disengagement, employability, and emotional well-being. Programs introduce intentional design elements—selection, training, matching, activity structures, and monitoring—that seek to create consistency and measurable impact.
Third, mentoring functions at the level of systems—education, employment, and skilling ecosystems. Here, mentoring becomes embedded within institutional roles, policy frameworks, and technological architectures. Systems-level mentoring raises distinct questions: Who are the actors? How are roles defined? How is quality governed? How is mentoring sustained at scale?
Across much of the Global South, these levels remain misaligned. Mentoring relationships are abundant but uneven. Programs are innovative yet fragmented. Systems acknowledge mentoring in principle but often struggle to operationalize it coherently.
Need outpaces evidence
National policy frameworks increasingly recognize mentoring’s importance. Education and youth policies across countries such as India, Kenya, and Nigeria explicitly reference mentorship as a pathway to equity, entrepreneurship, and socio-emotional support.
However, the global evidence base underpinning mentoring policy remains heavily concentrated in the Global North. Meta-analyses demonstrating mentoring’s positive effects and studies specifying effective design features largely derive from Western contexts. While invaluable, this creates an asymmetry: The strongest claims about mentoring’s effectiveness emerge from environments structurally different from those where mentoring is often most urgently needed.
Practitioners in the Global South design mentoring models within conditions of informality, resource constraints, and institutional unpreparedness. In this space, practice itself becomes a primary site of learning.
Gendered realities and the centrality of safe spaces
Gender dynamics sharpen mentoring’s significance.
In India, work with adolescent girls underscores how mentoring frequently begins where formal schooling encounters structural limits. Early adolescence represents a convergence of challenges: heightened dropout risks, intensified social norms, and transformative bodily transitions. Traditional approaches that rely exclusively on teachers to deliver mentoring or life-skills components face predictable challenges. Teachers are often overburdened, embedded within hierarchical dynamics, and themselves shaped by prevailing social norms.
Alternative models have emphasized near-peer mentoring ecosystems, where young women—often college students—act as facilitators and mentors. Their proximity in age reduces status barriers and enables gender-transformative safe spaces. In addition, adolescents also look toward these youth mentors as role models who are navigating higher education and negotiating a future for themselves. This serves as an example for adolescents to continue to strive to carve out a similar future for themselves. Within such spaces, mentoring becomes a process of co-navigation rather than one-way advice. Conversations center on decoding social expectations, sustaining educational trajectories, and constructing possible futures.
Importantly, these models illuminate mentoring’s reciprocal effects. Mentors themselves frequently report shifts in confidence, leadership identity, and civic engagement.
Institutionalizing mentoring within schools
Uganda offers a contrasting lens: mentoring explicitly institutionalized within school systems. Designated senior women and senior men teachers function as mentors, counselors, role models, and advocates.
Within marginalized communities, these teachers address needs extending well beyond academic instruction, including menstrual health management, psychosocial support, safety concerns, and persistence through schooling years. Their presence highlights mentoring’s multi-functional nature, blending informational, emotional, and advocacy roles.
Yet institutionalization does not eliminate constraints. Mentoring responsibilities often coexist with full teaching workloads, while dedicated training pathways for mentoring competencies remain limited. Time allocated to mentoring engagement is frequently subordinated to academic priorities. These tensions expose a broader systems dilemma: Assigning mentoring responsibility without restructuring capacity risks overburdening actors while diluting potential impact.
Mentorship and women’s economic participation
In Vietnam, mentoring emerges as a stabilizing mechanism within women’s entrepreneurial journeys. While entrepreneurship is inherently uncertain, gendered constraints intensify risks for women entrepreneurs, particularly through limited access to business networks, disproportionate caregiving responsibilities, and heightened fear of failure.
Mentoring models that prove most effective are explicitly gender-responsive and context-sensitive. Rather than focusing solely on technical skills, they support women in navigating policies and funding systems, while also strengthening confidence, agency, and entrepreneurial identity.
Hybrid mentoring designs—blending one-on-one, peer, group, and reverse mentoring—address practical realities such as time and mobility constraints. An important emerging theme concerns the role of men as mentors and allies, whose engagement can contribute to more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Mentoring’s moment in the Global South
For the Global South, mentoring’s growing visibility coincides with a period of unusual urgency. Youth populations are expanding even as the systems meant to support them—schools, skilling pathways, and labor markets—undergo rapid transformation. Technological shifts, particularly artificial intelligence, are reshaping entry-level work, skill demands, and access to opportunity. In such environments, the need for human guidance and relational support becomes even more pronounced, especially for young people navigating structural disadvantage.
This moment presents both opportunity and responsibility. Realizing mentoring’s potential requires designing intentionally across all three levels: mentoring as relationship, as program, and as system. Each level demands distinct forms of investment and governance, yet all must remain anchored in shared principles.
Young people’s agency, well-being, and rights must remain central. Sustainability depends on leveraging existing actors and institutions rather than constructing parallel architectures. Measurement and evidence must evolve alongside scale, generating contextually grounded narratives of impact. Finally, mentoring designs must retain specificity; without conceptual clarity, mentoring risks dilution into a catch-all term that obscures purpose and accountability.
Mentoring in the Global South can be shaped into a deliberate movement—one that provides critical infrastructure for human development amid uncertainty and change and a foundation for deepening youth-centered work in the region. It requires intentional design that simultaneously addresses skills gaps, network deficits, and restrictive gender norms, anchored in goal-focused programs and sustained support across life transitions. Realizing this potential demands coordinated investment from governments, institutions, and funders, backed by rigorous quality standards and evidence-building to move mentoring from the margins to the center of youth support systems.
