Suzanne Ehlers: Development Agenda Needs to Be Re-Framed to Focus on Rights of Young People

Summary: Successfully incorporating the rights of young people and women into whatever development agenda succeeds the Millennium Development Goals next year hinges not only on the scope of new goals, but how those goals are worded, says Suzanne Ehlers in this week’s podcast. Youth are a crucial component in the sustainable development framework, which UN, civil society, and government representatives are negotiating now. The choices young people make today – about their education, their employment, and their health – will have economic, political, and environmental consequences for the world well into the future. As director of Population Action International and a member of the FP2020 Rights and Empowerment Working Group, Ehlers advocates for the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people and young women in particular. Sexual and reproductive rights have gained prominence in the development arena but in many cases momentum has yet to translate into action. According to Ehlers, policymakers in developing countries are gripped by “a real fear of accepting reality;” the reality that young people are having sex, are being married at very young ages, and are not finishing school. Rather than “getting out in front of what a young person’s reality is and helping them influence the…decision-making process,” policymakers have been reluctant to confront the needs of youth in earnest, she says. This reluctance stems in part from the idea that cultural systems and traditions that deny basic rights to women and youth are outside the purview of policymakers. Instead, the international community has grounded its youth agenda in “box-checking,” Ehlers says, investing in health and education services without necessarily addressing the constraints that prevent young people from actually accessing those services. The result is a development dialogue which glosses over issues of rights and is steeped in a vernacular of risk and return. Will investments in infrastructure, schools, and services for youth “pay off” as future economic gains? Will the “human resource potential” of the vast numbers of young people be realized or squandered? For Ehlers, such investments will not succeed “unless we make the conscious decision to be on a different trajectory and to never ever talk about young people as a ‘problem,’ as a ‘threat,’ as a ‘vulnerability,’ – the only way that young people would fit into any of these categories is if we haven’t done the groundwork for them to realize their full potential.” We know we have this enormous human resource potential there, but if we’re not helping eradicate early forced and child marriage, and if we’re not putting comprehensive sexuality education into the schools and into communities, [and] we’re not absolutely ensuring girls are finishing secondary education so that they can go on to be a part of the labor work-force, we’re not going to have them to invest in as ‘human resource potential.’ She touted recent efforts by USAID to not only set a lofty target of meeting 75 percent demand for family planning by 2030, but also to expand the definition of family planning demand to include all sexually active women (not just married women). Ultimately, those best poised to articulate the needs of youth are youth themselves. Involving them in the drafting process for the sustainable development goals will require additional effort, but leaving them out, says Ehlers, will only generate policies that miss the mark, wasting time and resources for years to come. The key is to empower young people by respecting and fulfilling their rights, Ehlers says, not by treating them like investment opportunities. “I realize to some of you in the crowd [this] sounds like semantics and kind of a vocabulary lesson, but it’s not,” she says. “It really has to be about a complete reframing and re-pivoting of how we understand potential and what our responsibility is to unlock that potential.” Ehl(continued)