Y4H Adolescent-Led Advocacy Live Stream in Action

On behalf of the Youth for Health (Y4H) project, key decision-makers posted at the regional level, representing regional, zonal and district offices, participated in an advocacy media action in Dilla, which was live-streamed on Dilla University’s community radio channel. On 26 July 2024, DSW Ethiopia organised the 45-minute live-stream radio programme as part of the adolescent-led media action, where government stakeholders and DSW’s adolescent champions were invited to disseminate and advocate on adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights (ASRHR) budget issues.

Five panelists, including DSW’s Country Director, the Head of the Dilla Zone Youth and Sports Office, the Director of the Zone Health Directorate, and two youth champions from Wonago, where the project site is located, were able to voice their concerns, questions and perspectives on how to improve the budget needs for the SRH wellbeing of young people.  

As panelists, DSW’s youth champions Behailu Cheriso and Bethelhem Abera acknowledged the steadfast efforts on the part of the government sectors particularly the Gedeo Zone Youth and Sports Office, which has expanded to support the youth in Wonago District, where the publicly funded youth empowerment centers have created a healthy and enabling environment. “But” Behailu noted, “when it comes to sexual and reproductive health services for adolescents, the gaps in access to youth-friendly health facilities remain unattended due to budget issues.” He went on to ask, “Whether there is already strong budget planning underway to address these concerns?”

Youth champion, Bethelhem Abera, also shared the concerns raised before her and spoke about how youth demand for SRHR services was growing faster than the comprehensiveness and affordability of the service provision. She asked why ASRHR services, including contraceptives such as family planning commodities and other SGBV (sexual and gender-based violence) related services, are not as available, as they can be sufficiently affordable to the youth at the youth empowerment centres?       

In light of the experiences of the two DSW youth champions, the Head of Gedeo Zone’s Youth & Sport Office, Deginet Hailu, explained the core objectives of the youth empowerment centers (YECs) being built by the government: “We need the YECs to be the resource centers where youth can have access to health-seeking behavioral changing materials, where they can conduct knowledge management, where they can do sports, and most importantly, the YECs can serve as the meeting points for the exchange of inspiring ideas between and among them.”

Deginet further emphasised “In the Gedeo Zone alone, we have built about 29 YECs with varying levels of quality services. Six of these YECs have recently been renovated and equipped to provide various youth-focused packages, including indoor and outdoor games. Among many other services, contraceptives such as condoms are available at the centre, where young people engage in peer dialogue activities not only to develop self-esteem and life skills, but also to address their SRHR needs. The YECs are part of the comprehensive commitments by the government to reach out to the young people with a youth-friendly empowering strategy.”   

Ethiopia has continued to publish the Adolescent and Youth Health Strategy at the national level in three editions, each covering a five-year period. The latest one covers the period 2021 to 2025, which has been aligned with other development programmes such as the Health Sector Transformation Plan (HSTP II) and in line with the achievement of the youth health-related components of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Among other issues, the sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and the sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR), which affect adolescents and young people quite frequently, are among the most sought-after elements of the national health development strategy.        

On his part, the Gedeo Zone Health Bureau Director, Andualem Mamo, spoke positively of  how the National Adolescent and Youth Health Strategy (NAYHS) has enforced a guiding mechanism through which the Gedeo Health Bureau disburses the allocated budget for youth health needs to make SRH services as accessible as possible to young people. “Alerted and mobilised by such a project called ‘Youth for Health’, the sector in which adolescent SRHR has been advocated at its core has gained consensual attention among the decision-makers for improved budget allocation. We have forty-one public health facilities and only three at general hospital level, the need for comprehensive SRH services continues to grow as the region remains a hotspot area, it would have been a huge challenge without organisations like DSW supporting the sector with advocacy. Exploring ways to leverage the domestic funding scheme for ASRHR, including the ability to efficiently utilise the available and allocated budget, has increasingly become a new common advocacy platform moving forward to unleash a multi-sectoral public-private partnership to address the budgetary needs of SRHR among this vast age-cohort of adolescents in Ethiopia.”

“Although Ethiopia’s national youth policy identifies young people in the 15–29 age group, the National Adolescent and Youth Health Strategy defines young people between the ages of 10-24. The African Youth Charter extends the age of young people from 15 to 35 years. The latter category seems to have gained widespread consensus in Africa,” stated Feyera Assefa, Country Director of DSW Ethiopia. He further noted, “Considering the vastly stretching age group defined under the category of young people, the task and commitments to mobilise, increase and leverage funding for the ASRHR will be enormously challenging. This live media action can help those of us involved in the issue to reach out the key stakeholders at the right time. With the fiscal year underway and the budget allocation processes still in progress at the regional level, the opportunities to influence the ASRHR budget increase for Wonago District remain wide open according to our partnership commitments”, Feyera underscored his points in line with acknowledging the importance of multi-sector partnerships between public institutions, civil society organisations (CSOs) and others in the private sector, which he believes have long been universally effective as strategic inputs, not only to increase the value of the total sum of the collective outputs at times such as this, but also to be able to minimize duplication  of efforts. 

Following heavy rain that triggered landslides, one of the worst disasters the community in the Gofa district (South-Ethiopia Region) has ever experienced, not far from the intervention area, a minute’s silence was observed in remembrance, before the panelists set off their discourses on the scheduled topics, which were live-streamed.    

Youth for Health (Y4H), an adolescent-led advocacy intervention, has been running for just over two years. The project areas are Shanshemene (Oromia Region) and Wonago (South-Ethiopia region), located 126 miles and 216 miles south of Addis Ababa respectively. Financially supported by the European Union (EU), the Y4H project is being implemented by DSW in partnership with Marie Stopes International and the Youth Network for Sustainable Development, a home grown civil society organisation.