Get in the game: A collective effort for youth-led sexual and reproductive health, and monitoring to build visionary communities for change
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GVSE09
Global Village session
Global Village session room 1/Channel 11
23 July 11:00 - 12:00
CHAIR
Nthabiseng Koloane, Wits RHI, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
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The AIDS 2024 Global Village is the perfect setting for this interactive session! Get to know young people and their communities in person and, through video and sound, experience a day in their lives and take a walk in their shoes. Understand their vision for change where communities are safe spaces for sexual and reproductive and HIV prevention service delivery. Learn how they want to monitor success in their homes.
Contribute to the conversation with your experience, insights and resources. Leave your mark … and commitment when we reveal a large format mixed-media artwork (we’re talking meters, not centimeters!) that has travelled from east to west and south to north across the globe, with hundreds of people already adding their unique contributions. We are calling all artists and wanna-be artists to join in this historic moment! Art is not what you see, but what you make others see (Edgar Degas). This is your opportunity!
AUTHOR
Lucy Wanjiku Njenga
SUMMARY
The session brought together young people in their diversities to unpack what meaningful engagement, youth led community-led monitoring and safe spaces mean for them. They spoke on what listening and asking all the good questions mean to young people. The use of video interviews and speeches were engaging.
HIGHLIGHTS
The session was an embodiment of what happens when young people most affected in communities take charge of their access to health, information and dissemination of the information. Beo Leite, a transwoman from Brazil shared the challenges that young LGBTIQ persons have experienced in accessing proper information on HIV, testing and treatment and PrEP. This comes later in life when young queer people have experienced the intersecting stigma and discrimination and this should not be the case. When the generation is boasted as the information generation and can hardly access consistent and correct information when they need it, this becomes a tool to further oppress them. Young women shared how important it is to own the process of any intervention towards them such as PrEP. When it is introduced as a product by the pharma and other key stakeholders, it lacks their voice. They are only end users. For PrEP and other prevention and treatment options to be effective, there is need to have young people in their diversities in the design, research of it’s effectiveness and efficacy, monitoring and accountability, communication and not just as consumers. This is how the interventions such as PrEP will be transformational.
CRITICAL ASSESSMENT
The young people message was clear, they needed to be part of the things that affect them fully. Nothing for young people without young people. PrEP not being readily taken up was as a result of young people only seen as end consumers and not as experts that can inform the process and make it better. With young people as part of the interventions from the research and design, uptake, communication, monitoring and evaluation, community monitoring and reporting. This would be the meaningful engagement that would matter.