In Bosnia and Herzegovina, youth participation too often stops at an angry comment online. MojHub, a hybrid youth hub, is trying to carry it all the way to the institutions, especially in the upcoming parliamentary elections, scheduled for October 2026.
If you ask a young person in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, what they think about their local government, you will rarely get silence. Instead, you will get a sharp opinion, a meme, or a frustrated comment under a Facebook post.
What you rarely get is a young person who knows how to submit their opinion or a proposal to their municipality, request public information, or sit across the table from a decision-maker. At the Centre for the Development of Non-Formal Education (CRNO), a non-governmental, non-profit organisation based in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we regularly encounter this pattern in our work with young people.
CRNO is working to close that gap in the neighbourhood of Mojmilo, Sarajevo’s Novi Grad municipality through MojHub, by giving young people a physical space and a digital community where grievances can be converted into concrete and lawful civic action.
MojHub is a hybrid civic and educational hub and the model is deliberately simple: A real, open physical space at Trg Barcelone in Sarajevo, paired with a digital layer the organisation is now building — the website mojhub.ba and a moderated MojHub community on Discord.
Together, they are designed to form a single entry point where young people aged roughly 15 to 25 can learn civic skills, access reliable local information, find mentorship, and coordinate joint initiatives.
From opinions to civic participation
The issue MojHub responds to is the absence of safe, structured spaces — offline and online — where young people can turn their opinions into civic participation.
In practice, much of young people’s political expression now plays out online — fast, fragmented, and exposed to misinformation and harassment — while structured, offline participation stays weak.
Successive representative surveys describe a generation disillusioned with politics. In the most recent Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Youth Study for Bosnia and Herzegovina (2024), almost one in five young people — 18.8 percent — said that nothing at all could motivate them to vote. Many feel excluded from decision-making and have no functional mechanism to express their needs to those in power.
The consequences are predictable: Apathy, passivity, and — for a growing number — emigration. In a representative 2021 UNFPA survey, 47 percent of young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina said they were thinking about leaving the country, temporarily or permanently, with almost 75 percent reporting that living standards around them had stagnated or worsened.
Against a backdrop of youth unemployment hovering around 27 percent, many are simply looking for a community that listens. This matters acutely right now.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is heading into an election period, when political tension is high, and the temptation to reduce young people to merely a voting bloc is strongest.
A generation that only knows how to react online, but not how to participate offline, is a generation whose energy is easy to inflame and easy to ignore. In that context, teaching young people to engage ethically, factually, and procedurally is a form of democratic resilience.
MojHub’s goal is to build a sustainable environment for networking, cooperation, and active youth participation by combining a physical space with a digital platform.
Concretely, that means reducing young people’s isolation, strengthening their connections, and equipping them to move from online discussion to real micro-actions.
For example, submitting community proposals, requesting public information, joining public consultations and hearings, and tracking how institutions respond.
The primary beneficiaries are young people from urban neighborhoods with fewer economic opportunities, with a particular focus on first-time civic actors who want to improve their communities but lack support, reliable information, and a safe place to start.
The hybrid model lowers barriers to entry. Moderation and role-based access create psychological safety, and low-exposure participation options make it easier for young women, first-time participants, and youth from peripheral communities to take part without fear of harassment.
Secondary beneficiaries include youth workers, educators, informal community leaders, and partner organizations who can amplify these participation pathways.
A physical and online infrastructure
The physical space is already open and equipped, and it is where young people currently come together for workshops, mentorship, and community activities.
What comes next is turning a local room into a lasting community. That’s the work we are starting now by launching the public hub at mojhub.ba and building a moderated MojHub community on Discord.
These online spaces will help young people stay connected, follow opportunities, and coordinate actions between events.
This new phase deepens MojHub from a meeting place into a structure for civic participation: Cycles of training on how local government works, on transparency and access to information, and on election-year political literacy and resistance to misinformation, each one tied to a real action coordinated through the community. Sanela Šehić, collaborator, MojHub (CRNO), shares:
“MojHub will give young people something they rarely have here — a place that is truly theirs, not one they are just passing through. We won’t be teaching them to care — they already do. What we will be doing is giving that energy a direction, so it stops dissolving into online noise and starts turning into concrete civic steps.”
Over the coming six months, we expect to see measurable civic actions completed by young people, such as initiatives submitted, information requests filed, and consultations attended. Just as importantly, we hope to build a core group of young people confident enough to keep doing this without us.
Sustainability is the point: The physical space remains, the digital community is low-cost to maintain, and the young people we train become the ones who mentor the next generation.
What this work has taught me is that young people are not apathetic. They are unaddressed. Give them a safe room, a clear path, and a reason to believe someone is listening, and the same energy that fuels an angry comment online will fuel a proposal, a question to an official, or a community campaign.
MojHub firmly believes that participation is a skill that can be taught, and that the distance between a frustrated young person and an engaged citizen is much shorter than we assume.
