Caribbean advocates promoting basic rights of youth
Published:Thursday | October 22, 2020 | 2:15 PMNadine Wilson-Harris/Staff Reporter
Caribbean youth have forged an alliance to produce a road map for adolescent and youth health, which they hope will form the basis for national development plans going forward.
The road map addresses a variety of issues, including mental health, substance use, violence and injuries; sexual and reproductive health and rights, HIV and STIs; nutrition, physical activity, sports and youth development; and climate change and the environment.
Five Caribbean youth advocates – Pierre Cooke Jr, Christopher Gilkes, Michelle Belfor, Jean Sano Santana and Renatta Langlais – took part in the launch.
Cooke, technical adviser for Healthy Caribbean Coalition (HCC)’s Youth Voices, wants to see a move from policies leading to the enactment of comprehensive legislation to protect youth across the region.
“It is the right of every child to have access to the highest attainable standard of health and we are simply not ensuring that they have access to that,” he said in reference to the issue of non-communicable diseases.
“When we look at systems where in the Caribbean, we have major gaps in protecting our children in the food and nutrition system. We don’t have mandatory front-of-package labelling. We don’t have increased taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, and, within our schools, we don’t have proper legislation and policies in place to protect our children to ensure that they have healthy and nutritious meals,” he said.
Surinamese sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) advocate Belfor wants more focus on this area.
“Within this pandemic, we are seeing that sexual and reproductive health has been put in the background even more so than it was before. People are really focusing on food nutrition, which is fair, but if we do not focus on SRHR and gender-based violence we are creating a pandemic within a pandemic. This road map could not have come at a better time to provide the needed actions from young people…” she insisted.
The content for the road map was based on a discussion last November with close to 200 congress participants including policymakers, international and regional and partners, and young people.
Guyana’s Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony, thanked PAHO/WHO, CARICOM and UN Partners for their leadership and contribution towards the development of the road map.
“While the challenges before us are compounded by COVID-19, we have an opportunity of using this road map to usher future generations into a cleaner and healthier Caribbean. Can we do it? Yes, we can!” Anthony said.