GOJoven International

ZonaSegura is a trauma-informed, youth-centered innovative mobile solution to address teen dating violence in Honduras. It leverages the country’s high rates of mobile phone usage among adolescent girls and boys ages 14-19. The project, which includes a feasibility pilot study, aims to prevent teen dating violence through provision of prevention information, healthy relationship education, and linkage to services and resources. It is developed in partnership with ETR/YTH and GOJoven Honduras.

GOJoven began in 2004 as a yearlong Fellowship to train young leaders ages 18-30 in Mesoamerica on key information, skills, and competencies in the fields of Leadership, Program Design, and Adolescent Sexual & Reproductive Health & Rights. Starting in 2011, the program shifted gears to support the GOJoven Alumni Fellows to create their own, independently run organizations now successfully adapting and replicating the GOJoven Fellowship Model to train larger cadres of youth in their countries.

GOJoven International, funded by the World Bank, enhanced the organizational capacity of 41 community service organizations and government agencies to implement youth-friendly, evidence-based adolescent sexual and reproductive health programs and policies. By leveraging existing programs in Belize, Guatemala and Honduras, this project offered 2-day organizational capacity-building workshops in Spanish for 79 leaders and provided 9 grants resulting in increases in organizational capacity.

With support from The Summit Foundation, from 2011-2017, GOJoven International provided small grants and organizational development assistance to select small and medium-sized local non-governmental organizations in Belize, Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras to improve their capacity to meet the sexual & reproductive health needs of the region’s burgeoning adolescent population and create an enabling environment supportive of adolescent sexual & reproductive health and rights and youth leadership.

In 2010-12, GOJoven and Silence Speaks, of the Center for Digital Storytelling, created Youth Leaders Speak videos and training manual emphasizing the importance of youth personal narratives as tools for education, youth mobilization, and advocacy. During two 4-day workshops, 14 GOJoven Fellows recorded, illustrated, and edited short videos featuring their own first-person accounts of what led them to the field of adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights: gojoven.org/digital-stories/

From 2006-2016, the Summit Scholarship Fund provided financial support & guidance to 42 GOJoven Alumni to attain their educational goals, from high school to undergraduate or graduate degrees. The project’s goal was to open doors to further professional development and leadership positions for strategically selected GOJoven leaders who would go on to advance adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health and rights programs, policies and services in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.

With support from the WestWind Foundation, since 2013 GOJoven International supported GOJoven Belize to become a fully sustainable, youth-led organization working with in-country partners to foster services, programs & policies that improve sexual & reproductive health outcomes for Belize’s diverse adolescent & youth populations. GOBelize has developed a robust, multi-pronged approach to advancing comprehensive sexuality education across the entire country for in- and out-of-school adolescents.