I recently went on my annual site visit to Abuja, Nigeria (my favorite time of year!) to meet with the entire council of youth activists supported by our partner, Education as a Vaccine.  I'm always reenergized for the rest of the year, after an exciting week of devoted time to train, discuss and restrategize our advocacy efforts to improve policies and increase funding towards sexual and reproductive health and rights in Nigeria.  Every year, I'm more impressed by them than the previous year--mainly because I can see how they've grown so much as individual advocates but also as a passionate team working together to make change in their communities.

Aside from school and work, they come into the office every single day and work with Tope, my other half who is managing the project in Nigeria.  Our three-day training even stretched out to five days, once we realized the load of work we had set out to do for the year.  We achieved a range of activities from speaking with the Family Health officer in the Ministry of Health about budgetary processes to drafting our first e-action alert that would urge the Chairperson of the Senate health committee to pass an anti-stigmatization bill that would protect young people living with HIV/AIDS in schools AND prohibit mandatory HIV testing as a prerequisite for admission into the universities.  Believe it or not– this disappointedly happens quite often in Nigeria! 

We also drafted a plan for our next videography project which will focus on young people’s access to reproductive health/family planning in Nigeria. We’ll be rolling out with this project in the next month and I’m so looking forward to viewing the end product!

All in all, it’s always a pleasure to return to Nigeria…even when it’s over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and there’s no A/C!

We've mapped out our priority short-term and long-term advocacy objectives for, which will be:
-Passage of the anti-stigmatization bill including recommendations made by the council to include protection of young people living with HIV/AIDS such as prohibition of HIV testing as a prerequisite for admission to tertiary institutions BY May 2011 and May 2012;
-Increase of funding to youth sexual and reproductive health programs in the next fiscal cycle (through the various budget line items) BY May 2011; and,
-Securing a specific budgetary line item for youth-specific sexual and reproductive health programming BY May 2011 and May 2012.

If you're interested in these advocacy efforts, feel free to email me at mimi@advocatesforyouth.org.

Now, enjoy a couple photos of my lovely friends/youth activists in Nigeria: