Going to Scale in Ethiopia: Mobilising Youth Participation in a National HIV/AIDS Programme

From the summary
”This case study describes a collaboration between the ministry of youth, sports and culture, and the YouthNet and IMPACT Projects of Family Health International that was supported with funding from the Bureau for Global Health of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The study documents a successful youth-adult partnership that used youth-led Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) as an effective methodology for empowering young people to communicate with each other and with adults about their sexual and reproductive health needs.

Drawing on youth perspectives and input from all regions of the country to influence national policies and services, the methodology ensured that young people had the skills and tools to facilitate a national process of needs assessment and situation analysis. Successful implementation was made possible by the enthusiastic participation of 51 young women and men facilitators at the grassroots level through regional meetings and, finally, a national plenary.

The process for consulting youth on the issues they face, enabling them to prioritise issues to be addressed and to develop a national youth-focused action plan, is important for ensuring youth “ownership” of sexual and reproductive health information. It ensures informed, active youth “stakeholders” in sexual and reproductive health services in Ethiopia, prerequisites for healthy sexual and reproductive health behaviors. The approach provides more authentic data and experiences of youth in the area of sexuality to policymakers than is generally available from survey and focus group research. It puts youth at the center of the change effort and ensures that they are owners of the activities now developing to address the wider issues they have identified as determinants of sexual and reproductive health in Ethiopia.

The consultation developed a national youth consensus on possible points for the proposed National Youth Charter and Plan of Action through an interative process facilitated by the 51 youth facilitators. This iterative consensus-building consultation to contribute to or influence national policy might be considered a modified Delphi Consultation, a process developed and used in a number of settings for consensus building as the basis for health policy. The use of PLA in a consultative process facilitated by young people is an effective model for building youth capacity to respond effectively to HIV/AIDS, as well as a good practice for addressing the holistic sexual and reproductive health needs of young people.

Several issues identified through the analysis of the case study provide guidance for successful implementation of this model for youth involvement elsewhere.”