Youth leadership and participation is by no means a new idea, the presence of youth is attested to by at least 23 UN Conventions, Covenants and Recommendations. References to youth, particularly young women, are spread across UN documents spanning 1965-2004. While there are increasing numbers of young women engaging in the national and international arenas, their voices are often marginal and their presence less visible.

Many times, separate spaces are created for young people to build their agendas for change (such as youth forums and youth camps preceding bigger events) without bridging these with a space for multi-generational dialogue and development of a collective agenda for social change. This means that young women's issues and voices continue to remain on the periphery and never really become part of the mainstream agendas; while decisions that affect their lives are ultimately being made without their direct input.

Agents of change

Developing young women's leadership means providing the type of support to equip them to take up leadership in strategic and meaningful ways. It means moving away from the young women as ‘victims' ideology to one of agents of change. At a meeting of Asia/Pacific women a couple of years ago, a group of young women, after feeling excluded from more substantial discussions, took control of the microphones and overtook the podium ‘to claim space and make their voices heard'. This episode led these young women to form the Network of Asia Pacific Youth (NAPY). Its focus and strategy is to work for young people's reproductive rights and empowerment within the framework of the Cairo Programme of Action and the Beijing Platform for Action.

Activists and advocates

The Young Women and Leadership programme of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) advances the priorities of young women by recognizing the importance of strategizing and coordinating their creative visions. This programme, designed, driven and implemented by young women, provides an opportunity to cultivate a new generation of activists and advocates for women's rights.

In 2002, AWID and UNIFEM hosted an electronic discussion around the issue of HIV/AIDS and young women. For more than five weeks, over 600 young women from across the globe debated the impact of the pandemic and shared and developed prevention strategies. Following this successful discussion, UNIFEM and AWID decided to publish its main discussion points for a wider audience: specifically the constituency that does not have access to the Internet. The resultant publication is Act Now: A resource guide for young women on HIV/AIDS, which is an easy to use book with tools and information for those who want to start campaigns and raise awareness about the issues affecting young women in terms of HIV/AIDS.¹

Moving forward, AWID held its first Young Women and Leadership Institute in Africa (Cape Town, 2003) on the issue of HIV/AIDS and poverty. At this meeting, young women from the region identified the following ways to ensure that their efforts become more strategic: a) the need to connect issues of HIV/AIDS, poverty, and human rights; b) the need to integrate economic advocacy efforts into a framework for addressing their rights in the context of HIV/AIDS; and c) the need for a network to coordinate these efforts.

Involving young women in national agenda-setting

In the online discussion around young women and HIV/AIDS facilitated by AWID/UNIFEM, one participant noted that without proper coordination between women's groups and the youth sector, it is difficult for young women to become meaningfully involved in HIV/AIDS work, even when there are a lot of resources. Young women's engagement in the fight against HIV/AIDS should be at different levels across different issues and movements. In 2004, as a follow-up to the regional meeting held in 2003, and to further young women's involvement in strategizing and agenda-setting at the national level, AWID conducted leadership institutes in Kenya, Nigeria and Zambia.

These institutes are facilitated by a group of regional and international activists and practitioners with a focus on building young women's skills on analysis (gender, human rights, economic), leadership and advocacy. Through a focus on HIV/AIDS and poverty, participants do a visioning exercise for social change and identify policy instruments, opportunities and gaps. Strategies are then developed (with very concrete interventions and timeframes) for working towards this vision of social change. The importance of this initiative is that it encourages participants to build a comprehensive picture of the different issues and factors impacting on their particular concern (in this case HIV/AIDS and poverty) and locate this within the broader fight for social change. Through this, it becomes clear that in order to address the particular concern and to have a sustainable impact, other initiatives for social change need to be supported and supplemented.

Building a new generation's advocacy

Ensuring that young women's rights are protected presents a unique challenge that will require a tremendous amount of energy, new actors, new visions, new skills, new analysis and new strategies. In the context of HIV/AIDS, if we are to address the profound economic, social, cultural and health effects of HIV/AIDS in addition to the rise in poverty, it is critical that we look at how to channel our energies strategically. Young women, in particular, need opportunities and support in order to take up the challenge of leadership for social change.