In May 2002, the World Bank, in partnership with UNICEF, organized the first Rome Conference on Youth in South Eastern Europe: Policy for Participation, Empowerment and Social Inclusion. The objective of the event was to discuss effective youth policies that would guide the realization of young people as agents of social change, healthy behaviors and inter-ethnic cohesion in the region. Subsequently, the World Bank organized two global conferences on Youth, Peace and Development, respectively in Paris in 2003 and Sarajevo in 2004, in which over 100 young people and representatives of the major international youth organizations participated and discussed ways to more effectively include young people as partners in the development process. The World Bank then decided to dedicate a World Development Report to the theme Development and the Next Generation in order to bring to the attention of global policy-makers the existing evidence supporting the need to urgently invest in young people.

The 2007 Conference Youth in Eastern Europe and Central Asia: From Policy to Action built on these earlier initiatives while providing the first ECA-wide forum to the findings and recommendations of the 2007 World Development Report Development and the Next Generation. The conference focused on two primary youth policy domains articulated in the World Development Report: (i) transition to work and (ii) transition to citizenship which are today especially problematic for the young people of the ECA Region.