SAT focuses on three main areas of work:
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.
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.
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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 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, 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.