Beyond the Voices of Youth: Rick Olson

A History of Programming with-and-for adolescents -Beyond the Voices of Youth[1]

By Rick Olson

Close your eyes and visualize a child. Who did you see? A baby? A toddler? Or an adolescent, under age 18?

The confusion about ‘the who’ of our programming with-and-for-adolescents has a long history[2]. In 1946, UNICEF was established for the benefit of children and adolescents. I first learned about this through a mid-1990 UNICEF programming note, entitled Youth Health for a Change. References to children and youth can be found throughout the 1960s Executive Board discussions. For example, the Board approved, in 1961, assistance to pilot youth centers, and in 1969 reviewed UNICEF’s assistance to youth vocational and occupational training in 12 countries. The 1962 UNICEF declaration of long term policy for the 1st development decade stated that countries could receive aid towards all aspects of children’s development – physical, mental, social – and for preparing young people for their full adult responsibilities. This was to be done through ensuring countries include measures to improve the situation of children and young people in their national development plans. The 1964 Bellagio Round Table Conference was about children and youth, and called for countries to develop long-term policies for children and youth[3]. Shifts toward adolescent children started in the early 1970’s, when members of the board started advocating for UNICEF’s pre-vocational training to focus on the ‘adolescents who came under UNICEF’s mandate’[4].

By the end of the 1970’s, there were few references to either adolescents or youth in the board’s programming recommendations, and this trend seemed to continue into the early 1990’s. Only when reporting on the joint initiatives with WHO, UNFPA and UNESCO, would our work with adolescents make it into board papers. Youth, in the 1970’s’ considered mere beneficiaries of UNICEF assistance, gradually were becoming partners in the delivery or programmes; Adolescents had been subsumed under the health, nutrition, and education programmes for children, though their inclusion as a target population was generally not well articulated. UNICEF’s first State of the World’s Children Report, 1980-81, focused on maternal and child health; it did not talk about adolescents, youth or young people, but included some references to children 6-11 under our assistance to education.

The CRC, at the end of the decade (1989), defined children up to the age of 18 years, but it was mainly UNICEF’s response to the AIDS pandemic and children in difficult circumstances in the 1990’s, which brought back adolescent children 10 to 17 years of age into the focus of our assistance to countries[5]. It would take another 20 years, for UNICEF to dedicate its 2011 Report on the State of the World’s Children to adolescent issues. It was entitled: Adolescence – an age of opportunity. Almost all adolescent health priorities identified in the 2011 SOWC, had already been flagged in the 1965 WHO report on the Health of Adolescents.

In 1989, the WHO, UNFPA and UNICEF issued a joint statement, entitled, the Reproductive Health of Adolescents – a strategy for Action, which again highlighted the special needs of adolescents for information, guidance and health services aimed at reducing unprotected sexual activity, unwanted and early pregnancy and parenthood, induced abortion and sexually transmitted diseases. In 1995, the year that the UN General Assembly launched the World Plan of Action for Youth (WPAY), WHO and UNICEF produced a joint review of the health of young people in developing countries, entitled, a Picture of Health?[6]

That same year, guidance was jointly produced by WHO, UNICEF and UNFPA, entitled a Common Agenda for Action, which articulated the need for programming to ensure that adolescents received the relevant information, skills, services and supportive environments to reduce their health and development risks and vulnerabilities. UNICEF’s capacity to collaborate with sister agencies on issues of adolescent health and development was based on UNICEF’s country presence and our work with adolescents in the field. This work accelerated with the AIDS pandemic, and was supported with the establishment of an HIV/AIDS focused Health Promotion Unit, in HQ, in 1991. Until 2001, the Unit consisted mainly of a Senior Advisor on Youth Health, when a cross-cutting Adolescent Development and Participation (ADAP) Unit was established in Programme Division.

From 2000, adolescents and young people were a clear UNICEF priority, especially in respect to HIV. In 2001, the World Fit for Children declaration included the target: By 2005, ensure that at least 90 per cent, and by 2010, at least 95 per cent of young men and women aged 15 to 24 have access to the information, education, including peer education and youth-specific HIV education, and services necessary to develop the life skills required to reduce their vulnerability to HIV infection; in full partnership with youth, parents, families, educators and health-care providers. In 2002, ADAP published the study Adolescence - a Times that Matters, which called for increased investment in adolescents, and advocated for adolescents’ rights to information and skills; access to services, and a safe and supportive environment for services beyond HIV prevention, including adolescents rights to education, health, recreation and justice and increased opportunities to participate and to have their voices heard. The 2002-2005 and 2006-2009 UNICEF Mid-Term Strategic Plans included HIV prevention targets for young people and adolescents and participation targets for youth.

The last decade started with an external evaluation of UNICEF’s programming with-and-for-adolescents[7], which found that adolescents rights were well integrated into the HIV, education and child protection sectorial programming, and that UNICEF was very successful in the supporting children and young people‘s participation in high-profile policy processes at the global, regional and country levels. It called for UNICEF to improve its program guidance, internal programing capacity and monitoring and evaluation of its adolescent development work.

Following the 2011 SOWC, UNICEF’s 10th edition of the Progress for Children was a ‘report card on adolescents’, and showed the continuation of mixed results for adolescents up to 2012. By that time, 1.4 million adolescents were dying annually from road traffic injuries, complications of childbirth, suicide, violence, AIDS and other causes. Over 16 million births were among girls, aged 15–19, who we knew were most likely to experience complications and die of pregnancy related causes. An estimated 2.2 million adolescents, around 60 per cent of them girls, were living with HIV, while over 71 million children of lower secondary school age were not in school and 127 million youth between the ages of 15 and 24 were illiterate. In the past decade, there has been a sustained effort to strengthen results for adolescents, to address many of these long outstanding issues related to adolescent development, with HQ and regional offices developing and strengthening guidance and programming frameworks to support the on-going and emerging work with-and-for-adolescents by country programs[8]. Data for monitoring results among adolescents has improved, especially in the education and the sexual reproductive health/HIV sector, although the situation of early adolescents, 10-14 years of age, remains a significant gap. There has also been some significant progress in a number of the programming areas supported by UNICEF, with, for example, a 19% decline in new HIV infections among adolescent girls (10–19 years old) globally, and a 25% decline in eastern and southern Africa between 2010 and 2017. In other adolescent health areas there has been less progress, with adolescent fertility declining only 18% among adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa between 2004 and 2015.[9]

Now, after 75 years of development and humanitarian assistance meant to benefit also adolescents, where is UNICEF going? When you ask Google about UNICEF and young people, you will get over 38 million results. The first link is likely to be the UNICEF HQ page leading you to Generation Unlimited, a new multi-partner initiative, launched by UNICEF in September 2018, which calls for ‘new ideas and cutting-edge solutions’ to ensure that the World’s 1.8 billion young people are either in-school, training or age-appropriate employment by 2030. This is sort of what we were trying to do in the 1960’s. It is is a tall order, with 60 million adolescents of lower secondary school age and 142 million adolescents of upper secondary school age lacking access to learning opportunities in 2016. There may be some new opportunities for the aspirational GenU initiative within the education response to the Covid 19 pandemic, with many countries currently using technologies such as Internet, TV, and radio to provide continuous education. Unfortunately, over 460 million children and adolescents, of the estimated 1 billion out of school, have not yet being reached by the broadcast- and Internet-based remote learning policies, hence, a lot more new ideas will be needed.

On this 75 birthday, as we look forward to 2030, let us remember that we can’t change the past, we can only learn from it, and that we still have time to enable adolescents to change the future.

March 2021

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Endnotes:

[1] UNICEF established Voices of Youth in 1995. It became a digital space, where adolescents can explore, discuss and partner on issues related to human rights and social change.

[2] Maybe a review of the adolescent, youth and young people definitions might be helpful, as we seem to often use these terms interchangeably. For over 25 years UNICEF has been using the WHO definitions, where adolescents are aged 10-19; youth 15 to 24; and young people, 10 to 24 years of age. In terms of the CRC mandate, and a life-course programming approach, adolescent children, aged 10-17, should be the beneficiaries of adolescent development, protection and participation assistance, and young adults, 18-24, should be seen as key program partners.

[3] Postscript, in 2014, 50 years later, Africa had the lowest rate of countries with adopted national youth policies: 26 out of 54 countries.

[4] E/ICEF/612, UNICEF 1971

[5] See for example Executive Board decision 1990/6 on Children in especially difficult circumstances; 1992/26 on the role of UNICEF in combating HIV and AIDS; and the 1993 decision related to health and capabilities of young people which closely maps to the CRC General Comment 4 on Adolescent Health and Development.

[6] WHO_FHE_ADH_95.14

[7] Evaluation of UNICEF’s Programme and Work in Relation to Adolescents and the Participation of Children and Young People, Kartini International Consulting Inc, 2010.

[8] UNICEF Programme Guidance for the Second Decade: Programming With and for Adolescents (HQ, PD, 2018); Adolescent and Youth Engagement Strategic Framework (MENA, 2017)

[9] Adolescent sexual and reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa: who is left behind? (BJM, 2019)