Building a Movement of Youth-Led Family Planning
By Jillian Gedeon, MSc, IYAFP Executive Director
When I was invited and sponsored to join the 2013 International Conference for Family Planning (ICFP) as a youth delegate, I thought it was neat that I got to go to Ethiopia and check out the family planning scene. At the time, I was in the middle of writing my Master’s thesis about migrant and refugee access to contraception and had little idea what the future had in store for me. I was just excited to talk about my research results and learn about others’ research. Little did I know that I was going to make lifelong friends and colleagues during this one week.
During the youth pre-conference, young people from around the world bonded, shared experiences with each other, and started to brainstorm ways to stay connected. This is when we realized that there was no protected space for youth to advocate for our rights on the global stage. What originally started as a plan to stay in touch and support each other turned into IYAFP- a global alliance of over 1000 youth worldwide.
This year, at ICFP 2018, we will be celebrating our five year anniversary, and we have come full circle with this conference we call home. We are leading the organization of the youth “no panel” pre-conference, a gathering of over 500 youth for 2.5 days, to hone their advocacy and leadership skills. We are crafting a mentorship program to pair youth with older attendees to promote two-way exchanges of knowledge and experience; we are organizing the opening plenary on day 2 of the conference where we are scrapping the old-fashioned approach of having a panel and taking it on “vagina monologues-style”. We are creating our very own for youth by youth daily newsletter of conference highlights; and we are going to help close out the conference with an advocacy performance with youth dancing and singing along. This conference will see our most significant presence yet and we are so excited to show the world what young people can do.
We are especially excited to work with FP2020 in having them lead major sessions at the pre-conference and connect our youth with focal points from their countries. FP2020 has long been a staunch supporter of youth leadership in this space and has been an ally of ours for the past two years. Not only have they supported our Country Coordinators to be present at major gatherings such as the London 2017 Summit and the Francophone regional meeting, but they have been an incredible secretariat in connecting us with partners to catalyze youth-led research projects. We are also working together to create a series of informative videos to help youth understand the importance of evidence-based advocacy and how to overcome challenges in this particular field all while staying true to our FP2020 commitment which sees us reaching 6000 youth via family planning advocacy by 2020.
