By Haruna Gimba
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has hosted the inaugural meeting of the WHO Youth Council in Geneva, bringing together representatives from 22 diverse youth organisations from health and non-health backgrounds.
The WHO Youth Council is a dynamic network aimed at amplifying the voices and experiences of young people and leveraging their expertise, energy, and ideas to promote public health.
They will be working with youth and youth organizations worldwide to create a youth movement for health.
“The Youth Council is the central element of WHO’s commitment to engage with young people, by supporting their leadership, promoting partnerships, and advocating for their recognition and visibility,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “Your voices and your insights can make a real difference to realizing WHO’s vision of Health for All.”
The Youth Council will provide advice on health and development issues affecting young people, actively engaging the WHO Director-General and senior WHO leadership.
It will serve as a platform for designing and incubating new initiatives as well as expanding WHO’s existing youth engagement activities. Through the Youth Council, WHO will develop an inclusive Youth Engagement Strategy across all levels of the organization.
During the four day meeting, the Youth Council members discussed key priorities and work plans to accelerate progress on universal health coverage, noncommunicable diseases, mental health and youth leading for health.
They interacted with the WHO Director-General, Chair of the WHO Executive Board, Dr Kerstin Vesna Petrič, and other senior WHO leaders to brainstorm on concrete initiatives.
Several key outcomes of the meeting include; agreeing on mechanisms for making partnership opportunities accessible to young people across the globe through the networks represented by the Youth Council members and beyond.
To identify avenues to establish channels for the Youth Council to showcase their work during key WHO meetings and collaborative events and explore gaps in the availability of data on health inequity issues of young people.
Others are to identify WHO technical support to report these gaps; and
developing a proposal to engage with WHO Member States.
As a first step, the Youth Council identified opportunities for the inclusion of youth delegates as part of delegations from Member States and develop mechanisms to integrate youth delegate programmes with support from WHO leadership.
PMNCH involvement at WHO Youth Council
PMNCH introduced the adolescents’ well-being framework, the Global Forum for Adolescents and the 1.8 billion Young People for Change Campaign to the participants of the council, garnering huge interests and engagement opportunities.
PMNCH youth leaders, David Imbago, Lucy Fagan and Gareth Jones, participated in the working group sessions on meaningful adolescent and youth engagement and Universal Health Coverage.
