London summit shows growing consensus over young people's sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Doortje Braeken
The Queen Elizabeth Conference Hall provided a magnificent platform for the London Summit on Family Planning, a great grand-standing, showcase event. Successive speakers stepped onto the stage and declared their commitment to promoting, funding and expanding family planning provision around the world.
Some $2.6bn (£1.7bn) was pledged by governments and global civil society weighed in en masse to declare its intention to support, to monitor and to hold accountable all agencies in their delivery of services. My own organisation, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), committed to triple its services by 2020.
The summit, which too place earlier this month, saw Melinda Gates, David Cameron, the Department for International Development, global leaders and representatives of some of the biggest campaign groups speaking up with one voice and taking the message to the world.
But what was most of interest to me were the side events because it's at these events that agendas get pushed forward. This is where the debates start to add flesh and detail on how to deliver on commitments made under the spotlight.
One of IPPF's side events was on young people and the family planning agenda. Our invited speakers were truly global: Zainab Bangura (minister of health for Sierra Leone); Hussein Mwinyi (minister of health for Tanzania); Lady Lindsey Northover (government spokesperson in the House of Lords on international development and government whip and spokesperson on health, justice, and women and equalities); Dr Ian D Askew (director for reproductive health services and research with the Population Council); Aselefe Esefale Belete Endale (a young volunteer from the Ethiopian YWCA); and Syefa Ahmed and Kokou Senamé (IPPF youth volunteers from Bangladesh and Togo respectively).
The list of participants demonstrates how we are pulling together voices and organisations from right across the world, and shows how there is growing consensus over young people's sexual and reproductive health and rights. Panellists were asked about the challenges they faced, the things that need to be done better, and what needs to be done immediately and long term to increase access to services.
However, the biggest hurdle is that many societies don't recognise young people as sexual beings. Without acknowledging the fact that people have sex at all ages, and often before marriage, we are doing a huge disservice to those very people we are trying to provide quality services to.
Other challenges include policy, legal, economic, cultural, educational, service delivery and supply chain management. Even collecting data through qualitative research is a problem. Without better data, how can we truly understand the sexuality and sexual modalities of young people? If we don't have the data, then we are assuming we know young people - and with this often comes misplaced moral judgments.
The things that need to be done better? Develop a comprehensive approach to young people's mental and physical health and empowerment, recognise young people as sexual beings, provide comprehensive sexuality education for all both inside and outside school, train providers properly, and create easily accessible services.
As for what needs to be done immediately and in the longer term ... well it's all of the above, prioritised in each country according to each country's needs.
We now have a consensus on all of these things and have evolving approaches which have been proven to work in all these areas. Perhaps it's now time to create a comprehensive, commonly-agreed blueprint of components that are required to achieve the outcomes we all seek with regard to young people's sexual and reproductive health, and again with components that can be phased in according to each community's and nation's need.
There is an urgent need to create a definitive handbook of practicalities that must be done to promote young people's sexual and reproductive health - and how to do them - which we can then circulate to the world and establish as common practice in every country.
An overly ambitious idea, maybe. But then again, with the right influencers, new things can happen. Syefa and Koku, IPPF youth representatives, for example, were able to sit down on a bench at the summit and chat to David Cameron and Melinda Gates. Let's hope they were listening.
Doortje Braeken is the IPPF's senior adviser on adolescents and youth
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