Focus Areas – SRHR Africa Trust

SAT focuses on three main areas of work:

A Youth-Led Future

Meaningful Adolescent & Youth Engagement Participation and Leadership

PROJECTS HERE INCLUDE:

YouthWyze – an innovative online multi-channel digital space for youth to youth communication, life skills learning, and better connecting young people to SRHR services. YouthWyze uses social and behaviour change communication across Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, twitter and radio and reaches over 5 million young people across Africa.

SAT will continue to develop, test and package its training and leadership curricula to help empowered adolescents and young people create safer, more supportive environments for their health and well-being in their countries and across the region. We will continue to leverage our networks of SAT alumni across the region to serve as mentors and strengthen their resilience and confidence in navigating economic, social, and environmental challenges. And we will ensure that adolescent girls and young women are specifically represented in recruitment and in opportunities for leadership to grow them into strong women leading change. Our efforts will also focus on strengthening SAT as an institution, in order to build-in skills, confidence and capacity within SAT for young advocates who come into civil society with a passion for change and an activist heart. Within SAT and beyond into our networks we will work to better understand what technical skills and capacities young people need to better integrate into and interact with existing national systems and structures, and provide pathways for young people to contribute to the future and development of their country while earning a meaningful and dignified living from being of service.

If you’re under 24 years of age POP into one of our channels here and join the learning and the conversation, share in the conversation and become part of the YouthWyze community.

How do we work

We strive to increase the capacity, the agency, and the opportunities of adolescents and young people. We do this through supporting them with tools, mentorship and social networks. This empowers them to develop and enhance the knowledge, skills, and attitudes they need to make smart and informed choices that improve their lives and wellbeing, and those of their friends and peers. We focus on five key result areas:

1. Enhancing their agency, confidence, and resilience through mentorship and in spaces – YouthHubs – young people can connect, share experiences, collaborate, and motivate one another to be more proactive in their own lives, and active in their communities.

2. Improving their health and wellbeing – which we do through life skills education, enhancing their agency to make better decisions about their health, especially their sexual and reproductive and mental health, and supporting key service providers including governments to improve supply side services.

3. Increasing their work preparedness towards inclusive economic participation – by providing structured volunteer opportunities – currently in health systems – that simultaneously give them life/work skills such as computer use, public speaking and presentations, report writing, as well as team work, punctuality, financial literacy, and leadership (see more below on leadership). SAT plans in 2025 to formalize these skills and competence transfers into a more codified ‘curriculum’ for learning.

4. Increasing their awareness of, and activism in climate, and sustainability issues at local, and country levels. This work is just beginning in SAT YouthHubs, and will increasingly be oriented towards youth participation in climate solutions, including environmental conservation, renewable energy and sustainable agriculture, while also working to raise awareness of the climate crisis among young people to achieve a more resilient future.

5. Our leadership training and civic engagement programmes – again being formalized in 2025 – help to cultivate a sense of responsibility and influence in young people, to help them become leaders in their own communities and advocates at local, continental and global levels for their rights. Civic engagement in advocacy, social norms nudging, youth representation and social accountability/youth-led monitoring is designed not only to enhance their sense of connectedness and purpose, but to build the competence to lead social innovation, and to strengthen democratic practices and engagement with governing. The latter is our #YouthBuiltDemocracy project.

Youth Hubs – Youth Hubs are spaces where young activists come together to work for change in youth well-being and adolescent & youth sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), and to support meaningful engagement in health decision making processes and platforms.

At regional and country levels young people discuss their needs and those of their peers in health and SRHR and take part in advocacy with those in power, to change things for the better. They also think through and plan how to better support young people representing other young people in structures like provincial health committees, national task teams, regional economic communities, or local government.

Life skills for life – sexuality education, or education for health and wellbeing, is an essential part of growing up into a fully functional, responsible adult able to have healthy relationships and to make informed choices and decisions that protect themselves and respect others (see what people say about CSE).

It allows young people to protect themselves against unwanted sex and unintended pregnancy, to prevent and report abuse, to have safe sex if and when they decide to, to better communicate their needs and boundaries to others, and to engage in healthier relationships, and, later, in ‘adulting’.

Based on the International technical guidelines for comprehensive sexuality education (ITGCS), and on country curricula, young people collaborating with SAT offer each other essential education and information to keep each other safe.

The Adolescent Impact Centre

Progress & Accountability for Adolescent & Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health & Rights

Adolescent Impact focus: Innovating youth-centred SRHR delivery channels

YouthWyze Health – youth-led health is the future of health for young people. Health can’t be adolescent- and youth-centred if it doesn’t involve young people in planning, delivery, reporting, learning, monitoring and improving. Young people and SAT in collaboration deliver sexual and reproductive health services, including access to condoms and contraception, in ways and places that are accessible to young people and led by young people.

AYSRHR Commodity Access – there can be no sexual and reproductive health without commodities. HIV testing needs HIV test kits; HIV prevention needs condoms; contraception needs pills and implants & UIDs and more. Very often young people report back to us that they cannot access the commodities they need, making trips to clinics a waste of time and money, and leaving them vulnerable to a range of negative outcomes such as unintended pregnancy, STIs, or HIV transmission, and these in turn lead to life altering disruptions like dropping out of school, or child marriage, and or, at worst, death during childbirth.

SAT works with UNAIDS, other civil society, and young people to seek data and evidence on why contraceptive availability or unavailability and then to seek answers to the questions “Why?”, “What must be done about it?” and “Who is responsible?” we support engagement of NGOs and young people in social mobilization around commodities, and in social accountability with all duty bearers in governments, regional economic communities, UN agencies, and elsewhere. All this work has four main aims: (1) to mobilize pressure and advocacy for improved condom supply and access, (2) to mobilize for improved contraceptive supply and access, (3) to mobilize for increased demand creation for both condoms and contraceptives, and (4) to create new architectures for transparency and meaningful engagement of civil society in commodity supply and demand.

Adolescent & school Health & SRHR – the divide between education and health sectors has become one of the key barriers in the region to AYSRHR. Millions of adolescents and young people come most days of the year to a school and spend most of the day there. Yet many ministries and governments stubbornly resist fully integrating school health into either health or education mainstreams, and issues of ‘turf’; responsibility; unconnected budgets; and more continue to waste this game-changing opportunity.

SAT works here with education and health authorities to reduce barriers between education and health, and promote schools as sites of adolescent health.

A Better Normal

Supporting social norms for more protection of adolescents and youth health & rights

Traditional leadership in adolescent and youth health

Traditional and faith leaders are major norms makers in Africa and SAT has always worked with both at every level from community, district, national, regional and global to help shape more supportive and protective environments for young people. Our work here takes many forms and has two main aims: to encourage and support a more progressive rights-based public narrative on AYSRHR by traditional and faith leaders, and to support real and measurable actions they choose to take to improve AYSRHR health outcomes.

Health Professionals in supporting AYSRHR

Health professionals, like traditional leaders are also norms makers at individual levels where their opinions and actions influence others and as collectives in health professionals groupings whose positions on social and health issues influence public opinion. In addition, of course, health professionals have enormous influence through their everyday actions at the ‘coalface’ of health where young people interact with them for their vital health needs. SAT works closely with health professionals bodies in the region to support a more progressive rights-based public narrative on AYSRHR, as well as to support real and measurable actions by them to improve AYSRHR health outcomes.