Hi Kiki, thank you so much for joining us today. Kikelomo Taiwo is one of two youth commissioners on the Lancet Commission for Adolescent Health and Well-Being, which is where she and I have got to know each other. Kiki, can you share with our students something about your own journey as a youth advocate? How is it for example that a young woman from Nigeria ends up being a global voice for young people on the Lancet Youth Commission? >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm really glad to be here. The journey started several years ago when I decided I wanted to volunteer. And a lot of my friends couldn't understand it because as a young woman who lives in Abuja, the expectation was that I would want to for example date married men ,wear Brazilian hair, fix my nails and lead the high expensive life. But I was committed to living a selfless life, just struggling, Deal with young people, and I started volunteering with a nonprofit organization called Education as a Vaccine where I was trained as a youth advocate for adolescent sexual and reproductive health. So basically we were engaged at the time as young girls, engaged with policy issues that affect young people's reproductive health or right. And boom, that was how I started my journey and before I knew it, I became an international voice and the opportunity came up to apply for the Lancet, and I did and I got selected. >> To be a youth advocate, and I think you've alluded to this in your last answer. We know that young people need a set of skills that are not necessarily taught either at school or at university or in the work place. How is it that you, for example, learnt the skills that are required for you to function as a youth advocate, and what about mentorship and support, in addition to skills? Because I think this is a pretty important aspect of the role. >> Absolutely, so like I said earlier on, when I started my journey as a youth advocate volunteer with a non profit, one of the first things that they did, was to train us on adults, and sexual, reproductive health, what it meant. How it affected us as young people. And how we could engage policy makers and influence policies. And that training wasn't a one off training, it was a continuous training. But one of the beautiful things about the training was that we had a supervisor who served as a mentor. And again the need for mentoring, particularly for young people cannot be over emphasized because many times I remember I would tell myself I can't do this. My supervisor will give me a responsibility. I'm going to be like I can't do this. They're going to ask me, you're going to be speaking at this event, you need to write a blog, you need to draw up this. These are things I did not used to do. As a matter of fact before I started volunteering I struggled with low self esteem. So, that mentality kind of, I took that mentality in to working with BNGU. But with the help of my supervisor who I'm grateful that I met this in my career. He would always push me. He would always challenge me, would always make me believe in myself, and to a large extent, I would say that the woman I have become today is as a result of the investment my supervisor made in me. So the need for mentorship, the need for mentoring. Not just training young people one off, but continuous training is very key to the success of young people being a voice and being confident in their work. >> Thanks Kiki. One of the things that I think many of us grapple with when we think about engaging young people in a range of activities is thinking about how do we include a diversity of young people? Because I think many of us might believe that the most likely young people to become interested and to have the opportunities for participating, as youth advocates, might be those from a more socially advantaged or more highly educated background. How do you think it is that we can work to engage young people across the breadth of both social economic circumstances, to be ensuring that we're including a diversity of youth voices within our work? >> I believe that one of the things that can be done is to deliberately make a case for investment. So for example, the project I was on at the time I joined the organization as a volunteer, there were other nine young people who were on that same project. And we were all from rural communities. Now many of these young people were from humble background, if you understand what I'm saying. >> Yes. And for many of us, as a matter of fact, I stayed on the project for five years. And in those five years I stayed there, each year every single person dropped. So at the end of the five years, I was the last one standing. And one of the major reasons was because these young people had to struggle. They had to work, volunteering didn't cut it. Even though we had little stipends that was given to us, it didn't cut it for them. For many of them, they had to go back to become the bread winners of their family. As much as they loved being a voice for young people, as much as they loved being an advocate for reproductive health and life, they wanted to support their families, and the stipends weren’t cutting it. The organization made a deliberate choice to invest. Because I mean, if the voices of young people are that important, then we should be willing to make that commitment, and we should be willing to take that extra amount. For so many people, it is not, reaching to them is not a question of finances. What we need to do is go into their communities and engage the community leaders, ask their permission, do whatever it is that we need to do to get them involved. Because really if they really matter, then we would do whatever it takes to get them so they could be invested in. Making more investments it could be going out of the way to of finding their roots in their communities and designing the program to shoot the environment, to shoot their lives basically. Taking the program away from the city to where they are so that we can be intimately involved. >> Thanks. I think you've really nicely articulated that it is a challenging thing to achieve a diversity of youth voices within any advocacy space. Yet, it is possible if one, in a sense, intentionally sets out to do that, although even when one does that, like with the NGO that you were working with, there are still life's challenges there that are going to mitigate against that. That's fascinating. And finally Kiki, I think and maybe it might be getting a bit close to the bone for you in terms of your own age. But one of the things that struck me when I attended the HIV/AIDS conference, the global meeting last year that was held in Melbourne, was that there were a number of health advocates who had clearly been advocates for ten, 20 years. And in that role, obviously, had gathered a tremendous wealth of experience to enable them to function really very effectively as advocates for HIV/AIDS support in one way or another. Young people, obviously, at a different stage of life in terms of their own experiences and skills with much less experience and skills than they will have in ten or 20 years time. But to be able to speak on behalf of young people, presumably there is also a limited time period in which one can do that. Can you share something with our students about some of the, if you like, the tensions that come out of this limited time period that young people can actually function as youth advocates before they perhaps might go on and do other things? >> I think that's a really good question and that's something I am even grappling with as I gradually graduate out of the official age of a young person and, one of the things I struggled with Is being able to transfer the wealth of knowledge, and skills, and experience that I've had to young people. In fact, this thought led me to start in a young women's group, where I could transfer the wealth of knowledge and skills, because we all believe in young people are the experts of their own experiences, and no one can tell it better than they can. But one of the major challenges is getting young people to the social development space. Because for many of us, we started volunteering, and for many people that got into certain social development, many people started volunteering. I don't think the young people in this generation understand the concepts of volunteering. That's definitely a major challenge that I am trying to grapple with and I'm sure a lot of people are trying to grapple with. I think one of the key things that can be done is to begin to think about mechanisms and structures, long term mechanisms and structures of transferring knowledge and skills and opportunity and space. Because then again, if we say, oh, okay yes I'm no longer a young person let us bring a young person' if that young person does not fully understand the value does not understand, can not comprehend ‘why am I here’. Now let me quickly share an experience with you. I remember during my early years as an advocate, my supervisor then would ask us to go to a national assembly, which is the government body that makes laws. And I used to be really excited, but many times I didn't understand what I was doing. It was cool to go to the National Assembly and just attend meetings, but when it comes to articulating the message I'm clueless. I don't understand how my presence at the National Assembly can make a global impact, a national impact. And getting young people to understand and comprehend that process takes time. So one of the things I would recommend is that when instructors assist them, so transferring knowledge, mentoring, training to prepare the next generation. Because yes, they are the experts of their own experiences, but they also need to have the capacity to comprehend how the experience, or how they sharing their experience can make a change if you understand what I'm saying. >> I think you've really beautifully highlighted there the challenge of, in a sense engagements and understanding how change happens together with the need for renewal and knowledge transfer between generations. And clearly your own experiences have been very powerful with that. I think I've got to the end of my questions, but do you have any other comments that you're wishing to share with our students? As I mentioned to you all here, they come really from all over the world. They're from all different ages and many of them not necessarily working in the adolescent health field. Actually, here I am asking you for questions and I'm thinking of another. But I just wonder, one question is. And I think some people really wonder is this just tokenism was involving young people. Or do you really think that the quality of work improves, or the outcomes are better by engaging young people? Perhaps by way of ending, are you able to share something of your thoughts of how it is that by actually engaging young people as youth advocates, we're not just improving their skills as individuals in their own right. But some how we are doing this because of the belief, even with the lack of evidence that we have at the moment. But with the belief that actually it does improve the quality of the product. Whether it's the program they might be influencing, whether it's a policy, or indeed whether it's research that they might be influencing. Do you have any final thoughts to share on that? >> I think that when it comes to youth engagements, at different levels global, national, local, state. The world is at different stages. So the reality now is that some young people like being engaged as symbols, as a how do I do that? The participation is only symbolic and not necessarily a meaningful or significant result and in some cases it is tokenistic. While in some cases youth engagements are changing policies, we see situations of cases of young people holding their government accountable and making change happen. But then at the end of the day, I think that meaningful youth engagement does have it's own significance, and there is room for improvement. Because again, as much as we think young people should be meaningfully engaged, young people are not the only set of population in the world. There are women, there are children, and the space is so political. As much as we want our gender to be priority, other sub populations or other population sets, also have the priority and that base is political. But, to a large extent, I believe that engaging young people meaningfully that does have it's own significance and can make a huge difference, if done properly, if done genuinely. >> Kiki, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts about meaningful youth engagement and in particular for sharing what I think you're describing as the importance of young people being part of that accountability for national governments, and indeed globally, to be part of that community that is actually monitoring and ensuring that people are taking note of young people's health and well-being. Congratulations to you personally, in terms of your own efforts, I do wish you well ahead, and thank you so much for joining our students today. >> Thank you, thank you for having me.
