By year-end 2018, 14.3+ million adolescents and youth voluntarily chose a modern contraceptive method through PSI’s retail outlets and clinical service settings across the 50+ countries in which we work.
PSI believes the best solutions for AYSRHR programs come when young people are embedded in program design from the start. We’re proud to have met and surpassed our commitment, in support of FP2020 and Every Women and Every Child, to reach 10 million users under the age of 25 with modern contraception by December 2020. And we credit the achievement to PSI’s shift to our “youth-powered” approach – bringing in youth voices as co-decision makers for the health solutions that serve then.
But we know that to achieve long-term sustainable impact, we can’t stop there. At the 2019 International Conference on Population Development, PSI pledged to identify, train and deploy a corps of 500 young people from around the world with the skills to co-design and implement AYSRHR programs alongside technical experts – all by 2030.
These youth fellows will be employed as practitioners in programs within and beyond PSI, as researchers, analysts, advocates and community-level champions on meaningful youth engagement and design. Through inter-generational and peer-to-peer mentorship, they will be supported to develop the confidence and skills needed to successfully influence and deliver public health programming.
The pledge is part of our larger, cohesive global vision to work alongside cross-sectoral partners to establish quality standards for representative youth leadership, to determine how to track the impact of meaningful youth engagement and create pathways
to success.
PSI’s global youth-powered projects, including Adolescents 360 (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Children’s Investment Fund Foundation), Project Ignite (Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and Jeune S3 (Cordaid), laid the groundwork for our Youth Fellowship Pledge, and for the youth-powered projects we’ve since won in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Cote d’Ivoire, and more. We remain laser-focused on linking health outcomes to young people’s own self-defined goals, including financial stability and personal autonomy across 50+ countries that PSI either offers youth responsive contraceptive services and/or dedicated youth contraceptive programming.
In 2018 we developed, and by 2019 we fully employed formulas to disaggregate service delivery data by age, in addition to equipping our country offices to better understand youth use/need from a wider lens.
As the world faces COVID-19, we know that efforts to support young people to access modern contraception now will equip our youngest consumers to stay on track to achieving stable, secure futures. Through meaningful youth engagement and effective youth-adult partnerships, we continue to commit to bringing young people together with disciplinary experts to chart new and groundbreaking paths forward for AYSRHR. And with it, we’re continually working with partners across health-and non-health sectors to explore and evolve what it looks like to engage young people meaningfully, authentically and effectively – for lasting value for adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health and rights (AYSRHR) programming, within and beyond PSI.