Scaling Up Youth Leadership in Sexual & Reproductive Health

Founded in 2004, PHI’s GOJoven International empowers and supports individual youth participants’ vision to create positive change in their lives, communities, & countries, by encouraging strategic thinking, innovation, and intersectoral collaboration to maximize impact. GOJoven shifts the context for adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights in the region by enhancing participants’ leadership capacity, commitment, & vision to transform programs and policies.

Together with the GOJoven Alumni Associations, GOJoven has reached over 82,000 youth and adolescents with meaningful programming on topics of adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights (ASRHR) and/or leadership development. The program has trained over 400 new GOJoven Fellows, over 29,000 other youth & adolescents, and over 3,300 health, education and social service providers. We have also influenced numerous new policies & initiatives in favor of ASRHR in the region, and much more.

In 2011, the Summit Foundation commissioned an external evaluation of PHI’s GOJoven Program to build young adult leaders’ and local organizations’ capacity to improve adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights (ASRHR) in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, from 2004 through 2012. The evaluation identified GOJoven’s most promising practices for achieving positive outcomes to be:

• A focus on Fellows’ self-awareness and personal development
• Fostering a sense of community and peer support within GOJoven
• Use of a highly participatory, interactive training methodology
• Provision of ongoing opportunities for Fellows to apply new knowledge, attitudes and skills
• Institutional strengthening with Fellow involvement

In 2015, PHI and GOJoven International also conducted a survey of GOJoven alumni in order to collect updated information on alumni fellows’ participation and leadership in the field of adolescent/youth sexual and reproductive health and rights (AYSRHR). 140 Alumni (73% of those contacted) completed the survey, including at least one representative from every GOJoven cohort from 2004-2014 in Belize and 2004-2012 in Guatemala, Honduras, and Quintana Roo, Mexico. Findings include:

• GOJoven Alumni Fellows have sustained robust participation in GOJoven activities through their local GOJoven Alumni Associations, with over four-fifths of respondents (89%) having participated during the year prior to the survey.
• GOJoven Alumni involvement in work to address AYSRHR was extremely robust, with over four-fifths (89%) of respondents reported currently doing some type of adolescent/youth SRH and/or SRR work, paid and/or unpaid, as a primary job and/or as part of other work. Of these respondents, over four-fifths (82%) reported currently being in some type of leadership position in such work.
• Overall, 85% of respondents reported that they have more leadership responsibilities related to AYSRHR now than when they were accepted as GOJoven Fellows. Among them, 97% attribute their advances, at least in part, to GOJoven.