by Mimi Melles, Program Manager, iYAN Project

It can often be hard to imagine a meeting where young people and leaders such as the Executive Director of the Global Fund, Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director of UNICEF, Anthony Lake, and the South African government, Hendrietta Bogopane Zulu, Duputy Minister of Public Works, all in one room talking about youth leadership and accountability. Well, at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna—it’s not only possible, it happened!

At this session, youth leaders such as Ricardo Baruch from Mexico, Nikhi Gurung from Nepal, Nkonzo Khanyile from South Africa, and Stephanie Raper from Australia shared the gaps and recommendations to address all levels of youth leadership and structures in the response to HIV/AIDS pandemic. Within the Global Fund Board and Country Coordinating Mechanisms (CCMs), we discussed the need for youth diversity and adequate representation. We discussed the need for involvement of youth in further processes managed by UNICEF including the Sexuality Education Guidelines developed. We also expressed our deep disappointment in the Minister of Health of South Africa who sent another policymaker in his unexcused absence of the panel to participate in this discussion.

Overall, young people educated these global leaders on the following that we need:

• Meaningful participation of young people in existing decision-making bodies;
• Investments in youth-led organizations to enable themselves with the capacity to drive their own programs; and,
• Given that we are in Vienna, we need to make sure that all youth-led and focused- activities are integrated into the larger Main Conference program rather than a side-event that is meagerly accepted in the Global Village.

To emphasize my previous points, we need of meaningful and NOT tokenized participation of young people in decision-making bodies of leadership at the international and country levels. For example, at one point in the discussion, Chianti, the only youth representative on the Global Fund Board (who was also present at the session) was recommended by Mr. Kazatchkine to be “cloned” so that there were more “Chianti’s” on the NGO Board. I immediately gasped, with no offense to Chianti, but that the assumption that a homogeneous group of young people on a board would be acceptable was pretty absurd. At the country level, there are 48 youth representatives in the various CCMs and until this day, the Global Fund still doesn’t know how they can monitor how meaningful and valued their participation is in the process of developing the national strategy and funding mechanisms for the response to HIV/AIDS at the national level. The Global Fund also doesn’t know if these young people truly properly represent their youth constituency through sharing information and mobilizing youth to raise their voices through the voice of the selected youth representative.

We also need UN agencies and governments to invest in youth-led organizations, similar to UNAIDS’ new initiative with the HIV Young Leaders Fund. Youth-led organizations particularly are strapped for money, are extremely resource limited and often driven by young people underpaid or not paid at all. This is unfair and exploitative of young people’s hard work. Bodies like the Global Fund can make stronger guidelines on funding for youth-led organizations to ensure that the CCMs include youth-led efforts in their national strategies and funding streams.

In all of my criticisms, I must finally thank the conference organizing committee for making the arrangements to host this session. Without their consideration of young people’s participation, we wouldn’t have any sessions facilitated and focused on young people. However, one major criticism that I have is that we need MORE of youth-facilitated and focused sessions at the Main Conference. This is my third IAC and rarely do I find a youth session that is integrated into the Main Conference, let alone at a time in the day that can maximize the turnout at the IAC. Thinking back to Mexico 2008, I recall when all the youth sessions were at 630pm, around when most participants were eating dinner or recovering from a long day’s work.

Now thinking forward to when we host the IAC in Washington, D.C., 2012, I will expect (with all the optimism in the world) that there will be progress from this discussion and it won’t just be young people demanding the same questions all over again. Now, young leaders like myself must hold these global leaders accountable so that we will have outcomes to the commitments they made at yesterday’s session and that we will work together as partners ready to make effective, evidence-based solutions to the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic at the country and international levels, particularly for young people.