Blog by Souvik Pyne, YP Foundation (India)

In the last few years, adolescent health has gained traction as a priority focus area. Mortality and morbidity frameworks used to be based on specific diseases and health issues. Over time, with greater understanding of social determinants of health and integration of the discourse of well-being, the lens of looking at health has transformed into a holistic interconnected agenda under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs and the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health view adolescents as a unique constituency with health concerns requiring dedicated policies and programmes.

India as a country in concurrence with global health policy discourses, expanded its Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (RMNCH) strategy into “RMNCH+A” to focus on adolescents as well. In 2014, India launched the national adolescent health programme – Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram (RKSK) – to advance its commitment to a holistic approach to improving adolescents’ health and well-being. One component of RKSK is using adolescents as Peer Educators (PE). While it is a great framework, on-the-ground implementation has been hampered by various systemic challenges and limited meaningful youth engagement.

The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health (PMNCH) and Women Deliver developed an advocacy toolkit on adolescent health. The YP Foundation is a youth-led and youth-run organization in India working towards building youth leadership in different areas, including health, and a member of PMNCH’s Adolescent and Youth Constituency. We were selected as a grantee partner to implement the toolkit in India.

The YP Foundation used this opportunity to help advance meaningful youth engagement and integrate aspects of imparting advocacy skills to adolescents under the programme or the PEs. As a first step, we worked with the Adolescent Division of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to co-develop an Indian adaptation with the toolkit, which was launched by senior level health officials during the International Association of Adolescent Health 2017 World Congress. Since then, we have strategically initiated, involved and engaged with the health ministry in multiple efforts and platforms to advance meaningful youth engagement around adolescent health issues.

Our four major strategies are:

• Building young people’s knowledge, vocabulary and skills to do advocacy. The toolkit itself served as a great resource to design workshops for young people to learn how to do advocacy, especially on adolescent health issues. In concurrence with the health ministry, a simpler workbook suitable for use by all adolescents (including PEs) is being designed. This will be implemented in various districts in the country and subsequently may be integrated into the national programme on adolescent health.
• Creating engagement platforms for young people with relevant stakeholders in order to initiate meaningful dialogue and aim for sustaining it. In partnership with the health ministry’s Adolescent Division, the YP Foundation hosted multiple subnational youth consultations on adolescent health across the country to come up with clear and actionable recommendations for the health ministry to improve adolescent health programmes. These were deliberated in a multi-stakeholder platform that included health officials (national and state), civil society organizations, United Nations agencies and donors. Youth-led advocacy with health officials is ongoing at all levels to implement these recommendations and organize more youth consultations to incorporate more and diverse voices.
• Facilitating and supporting young people to plan and undertake advocacy initiatives. The advocacy workshops based on the toolkit inspired many young people to take up small social action projects to address various adolescent health-related issues in their own contexts. Many of them have yielded great successes too.
• Creating diverse, inclusive and widespread youth networks (comprising youth advocates engaging with different stakeholders) to cross-learn, cross-share and undertake concerted efforts. A constant focus has been to create and sustain a pan-India autonomous network of young people who are capacitated on adolescent health advocacy and engages with adolescent health programming at different levels – local, district, state and national. The YP Foundation is playing a convening role, while offering technical and financial support. It is envisioned to eventually transform into a national youth council on health and be recognized by the health ministry.

All of these efforts strive to institutionalize meaningful youth engagement in adolescent health programming in India. The toolkit has played a vital role in catalysing engagements and providing a framework. The YP Foundation envisages that all these endeavours will make a modest contribution to realizing “nothing about us without us” and to establishing adolescent health as a priority.