Sub-Saharan Africa: Child is a Dirty Word

By Tyler Ament | November 24, 2010

Sub-Saharan Africa faces many challenges in the areas of security, economics, and health. Amidst these challenges, the NGO Advocates for Youth is working to change perceptions and norms related to sexuality, and they are using health care as the platform to do so.

In a document titled “Creating Youth-Friendly Sexual Health Services in Sub-Saharan Africa” the organization enumerates a plan of action for modifying service design, provider attitudes, and facilities in order to achieve the “youth-friendly” objective. Yet, the organization admits that there are two obstacles that inhibit their work, namely law and policy. The document calls the legal systems in Sub-Saharan countries hindrances:

Youth also face barriers in the form of laws and policies that prohibit or limit confidentiality in serving youth. Such laws and policies fail to recognize both youth’s needs and their ability to make responsible sexual health decisions. Concerned organizations should work together for legal and policy reform to eliminate these barriers and to raise public awareness about the sexual and reproductive health issues that young people face.

Such a statement about laws and policies that “prohibit or limit confidentiality in serving youth” fails to acknowledge that youth, generally speaking, are members of a family and children of parents. Since youth live within a family structure, the primary rights of parents to care for their children must be respected. The balance of evolving capacities of the child in the context of the primary rights of parents to care for their children is reflected in such laws and policies that limit a young person’s ability to make health care decisions in confidentiality. It is entirely reasonable for parents to have the ability to know about the health care decisions that affect their children, since they are primarily responsible for ensuring the health and well-being of their children. Yet, it is not unusual for Advocates for Youth to see such a system as something problematic.

On their website, the organization provides a guide for “Affirming the Rights of Young People at United Nations Summits and Conferences” wherein they provide tips for sexual and reproductive health and rights lobbying:

Whether you are participating at a UN meeting or advocating for youth’s sexual and reproductive health and rights within your own country, you need to know about past international agreements that address youth’s health and rights. These agreements give you precedents[*]to use in your advocacy efforts.

The document goes on to list CEDAW, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and various other documents as precedents for a sexual health and rights agenda. In the comments on each of these documents, the organization freely interprets the documents to include sexual health and rights for youth, and acts as if such interpretation is the norm. For example, when citing the CRC, the document is careful to overlook Article 5 which states:

States Parties shall respect the responsibilities, rights and duties of parents or, where applicable, the members of the extended family or community as provided for by local custom, legal guardians or other persons legally responsible for the child, to provide, in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child, appropriate direction and guidance in the exercise by the child of the rights recognized in the present Convention.

Such oversight is not a mistake. If Article 5 provides a context for the rest of the Convention, then things become much more difficult for their sexual and reproductive health and rights lobbying efforts. Similar statements could be made about each of the other documents referenced as precedent in the lobbying guide.

Therefore, one could assume that although the efforts of Advocates for Youth in Sub-Saharan Africa seem like a genuine desire to improve the health situation related to young people, a closer look reveals a broader international agenda to break apart the family, which is a strong cultural norm in the region, making the term “child” a dirty word.

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