Beth Pellettieri is the Coordinator of the International Youth Leadership Council at Advocates for Youth and the co-chair of the Toronto YouthForce Advocacy Task Force.
Yesterday at the "Steady, Ready, GO!: Universal Access for Young People" session, speakers and young people turned research into action.
Steady Ready Go is the synthesis of research on youth prevention programming, analyzing studies to provide policy and programming recommendations. The research breaks programs into four categories for implementation. The first programs are GO for implementation. The second programs are promising and READY, but still need more research. The third programs are STEADY, but definitely need more research. The final category is NO GO, programs that don't work for youth.
Meheret Melles is a 20 year old Ethiopian-American student at the University of Maryland. She is on the International Youth Leadership Council at Advocates for Youth and a member of the Student Global AIDS Campaign.
To ask where youth may be at a youth reception sounds a bit silly, but the answer to my question was right upstairs. Of course there was a variety of sexy shirts that say money, access, and listen with messages on the back, reading the following: ½ of all new HIV infections are among young people under 25. We need youth-friendly services, including prevention, treatment, voluntary counseling and testing, and access to harm reduction programs. There was even a table for The Condom Project, where youth could make pins out of condoms and decorative fabric.
However, when I heard that famous youth icons like Alicia Keys were speaking, I walked downstairs to discover that only "VIP" guests could attend. Little did I know that very few of these "VIP" guests were youth. So what did I do?
Several thousand miles due south of Toronto, where activists and professionals in the field of HIV/AIDS are spending the week sharing strategies and setting priorities, the pandemic continues to follow its increasingly predictable course across Latin America. In its July 28 issue, Science magazine published a series of articles under the heading "The Overlooked Epidemic" that shed light on how HIV/AIDS is accelerating across the region. According to UNAIDS head Peter Piot, Central America is quickly becoming Latin America's HIV/AIDS hotspot.
It's not surprising, considering Central America's history of[img_assist|nid=475|title=Sexto Sentido|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=640|height=505] brutal dictatorships (many of which were financed by the United States), subsequent conflict (uhm, also largely financed by the United States), and natural disasters-all of which conspired to destroy infrastructures, weaken public services, and strain communities' collective and individual resources. Add the cold shower that is globalization in the global South and the economic migration (and corresponding spike in the sex trade) that generally tends to accompany it, on top of unequal power relations between men and women and an influential Catholic hierarchy that views honest HIV prevention messages as taboo topics, and it's not difficult to imagine how HIV/AIDS is already beginning to change the landscape of countless Central American lives.
Editor's Note: Our coverage this week has been dedicated to the Tornto AIDS Conference, but this poll, released this morning from NARAL Pro-Choice America, is important news we want to bring to our readers. In doing so we also note the increasing importance and interconnectedness of reproductive health, choice, contracpetion and disease prevention efforts in the public dialogue in America today.
On the reproductive rights front, the message is clear: Americans are tired of divisive attacks on a woman's right to choose and in November's election, they are ready to vote for a positive change.
NARAL Pro-Choice America just released a poll that shows pro-choice candidates have an opportunity to capitalize on the public's support for commonsense solutions to prevent unintended pregnancy and reduce the need for abortion. Nearly 77 percent of voters polled agree that the government and politicians should stay out of a woman's personal and private decision about whether or not to have an abortion.
Joyce is from Ghana. She is representing the Guttmacher Institute's Protecting the Next Generation Project at the conference.
I believe strongly in the power of the youth that can make a lot of difference in the fight against HIV/AIDS. I take inspiration from the young South Africans my age or even younger who fought for the freedom of South Africa.
I just closed from a poster discussion section which focused on the "Power of the Youth". It was good to realize how much concerned organizations are doing for the youth. Issues addressed by the organizations included that of gender which deals with both males and females-also inspiring because many gender activists are sometimes tempted to focus on only females, forgetting all about males. This indeed is not Gender Equity as they claim.
My major concern is the fact that the youth power was not felt at all in this discussion.
Beth Pellettieri is the Coordinator of the International Youth Leadership Council at Advocates for Youth and the co-chair of the Toronto YouthForce Advocacy Task Force.
Too often people talk the talk without walking the walk. This year, the Toronto YouthForce is aiming to change that by ensuring youth activists have tools to follow up with leaders after the International AIDS Conference. Through the Commitments Desk, key leaders, policy makers, and program managers are making concrete commitments for stronger youth participation and leadership in their governments, organizations, and programs. Toronto YouthForce members are then posting and distributing these commitments at the Youth Pavilion and via the internet so that young people can hold their leaders accountable to these promises after the International AIDS Conference.
Naina Dhingra is the Director of International Policy at Advocates for Youth and serves on the Developed Country NGO Board Delegation of the Global Fund.
Last night, the government of Sweden hosted a satellite session investigating the question of morals and politics in HIV prevention. The session should have been renamed "Speaking Out Against the U.S. Government's Moralistic Approach to HIV Prevention." The Swedish Ambassador for HIV/AIDS, Lennarth Hjelmaker, introduced the session by discussing Sweden's approach to HIV. Sweden has prioritized sexual and reproductive health as a key component to successful HIV prevention and is stepping up its involvement in the global community. This is good news for the sexual and reproductive health and rights community as Sweden is the new chair of the UNAIDS governing board known as the Programme Coordinating Board (PCB).
Fimba is from Burkina Faso. He is representing the Guttmacher Institute's Protecting the Next Generation Project at the conference.
Yesterday I sat in on a session where two of the five presenters really made me think. This "Hot Topics" session is important for me because I am the head of the human rights program for my organization, the African Youth Network for Health and Development in Burkina Faso (RAJS/BF). I really liked the presentation on advocacy to governments to support mother-to-child prevention programs and access to treatment for all, because this is a problem in my country.
Patricia is from Uganda. She is representing the Guttmacher Institute's Protecting the Next Generation Project at the conference.
I have just attended yet another interesting and very informative session at the International AIDS Conference here in Toronto, where a panel of five came and shared their experiences about working with young people. This session was of interest to me, as it highlighted a number of issues similar to what I do with my organization in Uganda. The youth have come out strongly during this IAC with a strong call to their governments, richer nations and big organizations to provide more support to help them realize their dream: an AIDS-free generation.
I come from a country where the government has made tremendous efforts in trying to reduce HIV infection from about 31% in 1993 to 6.4% in 2005. But one thing still remains, the youth are still at highest risk of infection and yet little or no effort in some areas is being made to make youth friendly services available to young people.
It is important to expose AIDS deniers wherever they exist, and the denial that many still have about HIV/AIDS and real-world solutions. In that spirit we tip our hat to Kim Sue blogging from Toronto for Time To Deliver AIDS Activist Blog. She states:
So how do denialists operate? Denialists selectively abuse out-of-date, peer-reviewed literature for their own purposes. In addition, they highlight legitimate scientific uncertainty as evidence for incompetence.
