In Kenya, a powerful movement is underway, led by the dynamic force of youth. At the heart of this movement is Y+ Kenya, a youth-led organisation dedicated to amplifying the voices of young people living with HIV and ensuring their access to timely and quality HIV and sexual reproductive health services. With unwavering determination, young leaders like Cindy Amaiza, the National Coordinator from Y+ Kenya, are reshaping the healthcare landscape through social accountability initiatives.
"Our strength lies in our youth and our unity. Together, we champion advocacy, monitor community health services, and hold decision-makers accountable. We have become very resourceful in developing treatment online and offline literacy tools. Most of these can be found on our Twitter as this is how we connect with most of our members," she explains.
Since its inception in 2018, Y+ Kenya has supported 15 youth-led organisations across 13 counties to empower future generations of HIV leaders. Y+ Kenya and partner organisations worked with the Ministry of Health, the National AIDS Control Council, and other key bodies to develop and mobilise these information resources.
The mobilised resources – hard copy information leaflets – were delivered and disseminated to young people far and wide across Kenya. The information resources, which included well-structured and non-judgemental step-by-step guidelines to support adolescents and young people from diverse groups, were now being used by young people who previously did not have access to this important information.
Building from this experience, Y+ Kenya launched the Adolescent and Youth Friendly Services (AYFS) assessment tool, which was loosely inspired by READY to Care scorecards. The tool informs health providers about the dos and don’ts in service provision to adolescents and young people living with HIV. AYFS also evaluates the youth-friendliness of HIV and SRH services, which was first conducted at the Coast General Provincial Hospital in Mombasa.
The assessment tool helps enlist peer mentors to gather insights directly from service recipients. The results from the scorecards give insight and recommendations for improving SRHR and HIV service delivery and the adoption of more youth-friendly policies. This includes general information provided by service providers about coping with isolation as a single mother, being a supportive partner, and building healthy and trusting relationships. It is also not uncommon for young people to be given insufficient amounts of medication when they visit the clinic, one critical issue they are aiming to address.
"As we have seen how powerful peer-to-peer support can be, we engaged young leaders to drive change from within," Cindy explains. “The impact was meaningful. The valuable feedback from this helped inform our advocacy efforts at local and national levels. It also helped promote adolescent and youth-friendly health services within the health facility, such as counselling and better and more practical information that young people can understand,” she adds.
Y+ Kenya received intense training from country-level partners like Amref Health Africa. Through funding from the Global Fund, they delved into critical elements of social accountability and community-led monitoring, equipping themselves with invaluable tools for change. With their newfound knowledge, they also developed a simplified and digitised social accountability tool to help revolutionise youth-friendly HIV/SRHR service provision and plan to launch the tool in more clinics and hospitals nationwide.
"We make decisions on programming using evidence and data that speaks to the issues," Cindy emphasises. We had social accountability training sessions, which taught us to use scorecards in our communities to assess the quality of sexual and reproductive health services…This allows us to collect key information that can be used as evidence for advocacy and fundraising,’’ she reveals.
The Ground Up project, led by Y+ Global and funded by UNICEF Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office, also achieved building skills for resource mobilisation, namely health information resources for young people living with HIV in all their diversity. Activists at Y+ Kenya learnt how to collect information, prepare and design resources, and share them by targeting young people who need them.
As Cindy reflects on their journey, she offers sage advice to fellow youth-led networks. "Advocacy is a long-term process," she reminds us. “If we want to see changes to our health systems, it must start with us. We're a generation with voices, with smartphones, and with the power to hold the system accountable. Together, online and offline, we can build a healthcare system that embraces us, not excludes us, and youth social accountability is the key to unlocking it,” she concludes.
Ground Up is funded by the SIDA 2gether 4SRHR programme. UNICEF ESARO supports youth-led SRHR and HIV networks in the region to build capacity and advocacy efforts to bring about the changes they see necessary to fulfil their rights and potential.