Brittany: That’s a great way of putting it. You mentioned as long as youth anywhere aren’t able to [access sexual and reproductive health services], there’s still work to be done.
Alan: Exactly! That’s one of the things that we want to ensure. We want to ensure that every single young person everywhere, regardless of their age, or sex, or origin, or economic status, etc., they can access their sexual and reproductive health rights. That’s something we’re striving for at IYAFP.
Brittany: What is something you wish more people knew regarding AYSRH?
Alan: I wish more people knew that AYSRH is a fundamental human right that is still being denied. I think that one of the problems is that people in general cannot understand the importance of considering access to sexual and reproductive health as a fundamental human right. When governments, when societies, when socio-cultural norms actively deny young people access to sexual and reproductive health, that constitutes a violation of a fundamental human right. It’s not only about the service that is not being provided, it’s about a human right being denied. There needs to be active policies and programs from governments to ensure that young people have access to those human rights. I think that’s something that changes the narrative around access to AYSRH work.
Brittany: You mentioned coordination, and there is a trend in the FP field to strengthen activities and partnership at the regional level, in addition to country and global levels. How does that regional coordination happen for IYAFP?
Alan: At the moment at IYAFP, we don’t have a focal person, one specific person responsible for managing the coordination work for a specific region. Coordination amongst regions has happened, or across even different regions has happened in different ways. One example is our Latin American Country Coordinators have started, by themselves, coordinating work and implementing projects by working together, planning together. In addition, we at IYAFP issue what we call community grants for our Coordinators to implement projects in their countries. This time around, we launched a participatory process where Country Coordinators needed to apply and they themselves rated all applicants and decided who would get the grants. What is very interesting about this experience is that many Country Coordinators decided to work together on regional projects and pitch their projects together. Our Latin American Country Coordinators applied together and pitched a project and that project got selected. The coordination happened in a very organic way between Latin American Country Coordinators, just joining the Slack channel together, coordinating by themselves what project they’re going to pitch, what is the process, and they presented it. They’re now finalizing the implementation of that project. Other Country Coordinators in other regions and subregions have done the same as well.