Abuja Call to Action

Abuja Call to Action: Increase Investments for Youth Health and Development

The Call to Action was read by Honorable Saudatu Sani at the closing on Tuesday, April 29. We invite comments until 5/16.

From 27-29 April 2008, in Abuja, Nigeria, 550 participants from 37 countries from throughout the world discussed new research and program findings at a notable International Conference, “Investing in Young People’s Health and Development: Research that Improves Policies and Programs.”* The conference leadership of all ages – drawn from academia, government, civil society, and parliamentarians – call on governments and donors to increase investments for youth health and development as an essential step to ensure the promise that young people hold for the future. We:

· Recall the emphasis on youth at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development and the challenge of meeting the Millennium Development Goals;

· Recognize that youth aged 10 to 24 make up about one of every three people in many countries and represent society’s hope for the future;

· Celebrate the potential and resourcefulness present in all young people as they transit to adulthood;

· Acknowledge the rapid social transitions and challenges surrounding youth that hold positive and negative implications, including urbanization, technology, and globalization;

· Note that while many youth are healthy, the transition to adulthood involves many health-threatening problems, such as road traffic accidents, tobacco use, and problems related to sexual and reproductive health;

· Emphasize that adolescent girls are among the most vulnerable of all groups for HIV infection due to gender-based biological, social, cultural, and economic reasons, including sexual coercion;

· Underscore the risks of very early pregnancy (e.g., maternal mortality) to both married and unmarried girls;

· Recognize a lack of attention and resources focused on young adolescents (ages 10-14), young married youth, and marginalized groups such as street children, sex workers, displaced youth, teenage orphans, injection drug users, trafficked youths and domestic servants;

· Recognize the importance of meaningful youth participation in all program elements.

The conference focused on sexual and reproductive health issues, including the promotion of positive reproductive health outcomes, and on social and economic development of youth, recognizing:

· A wide consensus exists on positively redirecting the high energy, protective and risk factors for youth involving social and community norms and policies, yet more research is needed on how to reinforce their resourcefulness and protective factors (such as family, education, and religion) and mitigate risk factors such as inequitable gender norms, sexual coercion and violence, and very early pregnancies;

· Even so, some interventions have a strong positive evidence base and need to be widely implemented now, including:
· curriculum-based sexuality, family life, and HIV education with appropriate information for
different age groups and certain criteria
· gender-sensitive youth-friendly services that include community outreach
· information campaigns that involve more than one type of media
· policies that increase access to contraception, including emergency contraception expanded
opportunities for girls’ education

· Other promising interventions require more evaluation, programmatic scale-up, and broader policy support, including:
· curriculum-based peer education interventions
· working with communities to reduce sexual coercion
· projects that work with parents
· social support systems for young married women

Therefore, this conference calls on donors and governments, working with civil society and the international health and development community, to invest new and substantial funds and other resources to:

· Scale up youth projects found to be effective, working through sustainable institutions.

· Support research to:
· identify elements needed to scale up effective interventions with sustainability
· analyze promising interventions to assess whether they should be scaled up

· Encourage multiple ministries often involved with youth to consider a formal collaboration with clear responsibilities, funding, and youth involvement.

· Support closer linkages between research, programs, and policy development, utilizing findings from operations research and policy implementation.

· Pay attention to those groups who are particularly exposed to debilitating vulnerabilities.

· Address negative gender norms through improved laws, policies, and the implementation of these policies.

· Track the progress of youth programs at the country level including financial
investment, number and type of youth services, and social and health status of youth.

With this greater investment, the participants and sponsors of this conference, in turn, make a commitment to at least re-double our efforts to reinforce the great potential of youth, to enable their healthy transition to adulthood. Youth carry the hopes of us all that each future generation will be better off than the one before.

* The Gates Institute of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health sponsored the meeting with multiple partners, including the University of Ibadan’s Center for Population and Reproductive Health and the Obafemi Awolowo University’s Department of Community Health. “Youth” and “young people” refer to ages 10 to 24.