Stakeholders Praise Y4H Project at Advocacy Workshops

Organised by DSW Ethiopia as part of its prior planning for implementation of the Youth-for-Health (Y4H) project, a series of two advocacy workshops were held two weeks apart in Dilla and Shashemene in late July and early August 2024 respectively. The two advocacy workshops together attracted a total of sixty participants including adolescents, decision makers and local government officials.  

A half-day workshop was convened in Dilla, the administrative headquarters of Gedeo Zone (South Ethiopia Region), on 25 July 2024. The Regional Speaker of the House, Mrs. Misgana Wakeyo, representing the South-Ethiopia Region, took the lead role during the three-team plenary session. “This workshop arrives in time as we have made progress in the cascading of budget allocation through regions, zones and districts. Our informed position based on the knowledge gained about the growing scarcity of funds to meet the urgent needs of adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights (ASRHR) will mean a lot in our action to leverage domestic funding and pay close attention to the possible increase in ASRHR’s budget disbursement. Since the recess of Parliament, most of us have been obliged to reach out to our respective constituents,” the House Speaker pointed out.

With Parliament recessing at the beginning of July, most parliamentarians, including the senior members of the various standing committees at both National and Regional levels, have returned to their home constituencies with the checklists to engage with local communities in assessing their development needs as they continue to prioritise budget spending.

 “We have timed our advocacy workshop to coincide with the recess of the Houses of People’s Representatives, and enabled the adolescent and youth champions who advocate for the SRH budget-related messages to find their ways in the checklists. Whether the advocacy effort is for increased budget allocations or for domestic funding to meet the unmet budget needs for ASRHR, the fact that adolescent and youth champions themselves are here at the workshop to raise their voices directly with key government stakeholders has a real impact on the outcomes of the crucial decisions the will be made when the House of Representatives returns to Parliament towards the end of September. These workshops are part of a cascading effort to disseminate and assert the budget issues on ASRHR advocated by and for adolescents and youth linking the earlier activities that produced the budget studies and the advocacy workshop convened the by Federal Parliamentarians. Such coherent advocacy efforts help to create a ripple effect in terms of influencing policies and decision making processes at national, regional and local levels,” said Feyera Assefa, Country Director of DSW Ethiopia.  

Feyera has also acknowledged the growing good practices confirmed and reported by the government stakeholders that in some cases as high as 60 percent participation of youth in the processes of decisions making activities related to social and political affairs related.      

The increase in the nominal participation of young people in the decision-making processes of various local authorities, which was praised by the youth and other key stakeholders, would have made an even more rapid difference in terms of the impact of the priorities on the ASRHR budget requirements if the youth themselves had not only been involved in the processes, but had actually been able to decide on the outcomes of each action or part of it, as was strongly emphasised by each of the youth champions who participated in  the advocacy workshops.

Although the two advocacy workshops took place in separate locations and at different times, the general energy and enthusiasm of both the youth and other stakeholders representing different  government sectors, especially those in a position to make budget decisions, led to very engaging discussions throughout the half-day workshops. In Shashemene (Oromia Region), one of the other hotspot cities where the Y4H project is being implemented, both the advocacy workshop and the adolescent-led media action focused mainly on engaging relevant stakeholders in actionable ASRHR budget allocation and consideration.

In the same spirit, manner and context as the first workshop held in Dilla at the end of July, a half-day advocacy workshop was organised by DSW Ethiopia in Shashemene town at the Tantostina Hotel on August 7 2024. Similarly, a day later, another adolescent-led media action went live on air. The adolescent-led live stream media action, which was hosted by Shashemene Fana F.M radio station for a duration of 45-minutes, involved three youth champions, two of whom were female, and another youth leader who engaged in discussions with the head of the zone office for Youth and Sports Affairs Zone and the representative of the regional health office. The pre-announcement of the event prior to the media action attracted many young people to tune in to the live stream action, and some of them were able to phone in and ask ASRHR related questions.

Driven both by the questions raised by the youth champions who took the lead role as panelists during the live stream event, and by the questions raised by other youth via phone calls, the two government officials who took part in the media outreach  acknowledged that the budget-related issues that were interactively discussed were among the valuable inputs in their checklist for further action. Among the key takeaways praised by the officials were the ways in which the Y4H intervention set the stage for engaging advocacy effort as a source of knowledge on how to better address ASRHR-related budget issues.

Launched in July 2023, the implementing period of the Youth for Health (Y4H) project is three years. Although the project has a wide scope, covering six countries in Africa, it is coordinated in Ethiopia by a consortium of three organisations led by Marie Stopes International (Ethiopia) in partnership with DSW and the Youth Network for Sustainable Development (YNSD). The Y4H project is co-funded by the European Union.