Summary of Questions and Answers
After her presentation, Professor Sawyer conversed with moderator Cate Lane (Director of the Adolescent and Youth Portfolio at FP2020) to answer questions from participants on a range of topics, including: partnership, Positive Youth Development, changing investment levels for adolescents, the importance of advocacy, youth participation in programs, and the balance between protecting and empowering young people.
When asked about applying findings in programs, Professor Sawyer advised: “Think multi-sectorally. Go beyond health.” This is how we start to invest not just in health problems, but also to prevent health risks associated with social determinants of health—education, family, transforming gender roles and social norms, and supporting positive youth development.
Similarly, we tend to think about youth programming (or any programming) in vertical silos. We often address health problems through the health system. However, “positive youth development” (PYD) programs cut across these vertical silos. PYD programs empower youth by providing safe spaces for young people to develop life skills and to promote healthy behaviors—for example, homework clubs not only support girls’ educational aspirations, but develop protective social relationships and create links to wider opportunities and health care. PYD also allows us to look at root causes of poor health outcomes—child marriage, for one—and support factors that can mitigate these risks. Another example is education: Among the best investments to be made for adolescent health is quality education.
Advocacy is required to increase investment in adolescent health. With under 2% of development health assistance going to adolescent health, despite adolescents making up a significant proportion of populations in these countries, there hasn’t been sufficient global leadership or funding for adolescent health. Country by country, we need to build professional capacity around adolescent health, including public health, clinical services, and research. Building capacity and supporting individual leaders—including youth leaders—is important for moving this agenda forward. Advocacy is also important to keep adolescents’ needs in mind as we design and implement programs. Most experts focus on younger children or adults, often forgetting adolescents.
Engaging young people is also important. When young people are empowered to speak up about their own health needs, they can come up with solutions that can provide important insights to policymakers and program developers. Within these efforts, it is important to be inclusive and intentionally include young people’s voices that are harder to hear—for example, disabled, poor, and marginalized youth. Collaboration with a range of partners is key to ensuring that many different young opinions can be incorporated into program design.
One participant asked, “How can we protect young people, while still respecting the diversity of adolescents?” Sawyer responded that one thing to consider is the importance of laws. We need to change laws to bring down the legal age of engaging in relatively safe behaviors so young people can more fully participate in society (for example, voting) while thinking how laws can protect them in other ways (for example, increasing the legal age for alcohol consumption). She summed it up by saying, “Thinking about how to balance protection and support with engagement and empowerment—has been transformative in the way I’ve started to think about developing legal frameworks and policies for adolescents.”