Our Body, Our Rights: Empowering Youth through Youth in India

©The YP Foundation

Last Friday, I was given the great opportunity to listen to a young woman from India named Ishita Chaudrhy speak about her founding of The YP Foundation (TYPF), one of the largest youth-led organization in India, which focuses on the importance of empowering young people to address such issues as sexual and reproductive health rights, gender empowerment, HIV/AIDS, maintaining peace, and “pro-active citizenship.” Her presentation, which was given at the American Jewish World Service office and sponsored by the International Women’s Health Coalition, was both enlightening and inspiring: TYPF seems to be in conjunction with a lot of AIDemocracy’s mission of empowering students and youth to become more active and have dialogue about global issues.

In India today, there are roughly 315 million people under the age of 24—a whopping 31% of the population. When she was 17, Ishita experienced violent political outbursts and riots and was surprised and saddened by the lack of participation or willingness to speak up on behalf of her peers. She found herself questioning how such a large percentage of the population could be neglected so deeply in the political decision making process, so in 2002 she founded TYPF at her high school and began to organize and motivate her fellow youth of India. India has long been a country where the topics about gender empowerment and sexuality have been largely unmentionable topics of discussion, but Ishita’s work at international, regional, and local levels has allowed youth to be able to talk about their sexuality and to make its importance known to their elders in their communities. Ishita put a lot of emphasis on the two unique approaches that youth bring to the table in the development process: an understanding of what is culturally relevant in order to assist development professionals to make better decisions and a capacity to make information age appropriate and relevant to youth. She calls this the rights-based approach, in that it involves young people in the full process of development—starting with assessing the problems and following through with the implementation of change.

During her presentation, Ishita spent a lot of time talking about one of TYPF’s largest campaigns at the moment: Know Your Body Know Your Rights (KYBKYR), which zeroes in on the importance of youth receiving Comprehensive Sexual Education (CSE). Know Your Body Know Your Rights is a youth-led campaign that trains young people to become Peer Facilitators on issues of Sexuality. Sexual and Reproductive Health, and HIV/AIDS over the course of a 4-6 month training. Once they have completed this training, these youth leaders go out into their communities for about 5 months, meeting with various stakeholders and leading different types of workshops to address people with different backgrounds and cultural experiences. 50% of new HIV infections in India occur in young people and TYPF is very passionate about the fact that this percentage could be greatly decreased with a greater focus on CSE and education for youth through their peers. I was very impacted by one story that Ishita told about the various TYPF campaigns over the years. She mentioned how her first CSE campaign failed, because it focused solely on HIV, a topic that is not publicly discussed. In its second year, TYPF reformed their campaign strategies to make education more about sexuality, empowerment, and health, as a way to make youth realize that their lives should be in their own hands and not in those of distant and patriarchal leaders.

If there is one thing that I took away from Ishita’s presentation on TYPF and KYBKYR, it is that in order to educate young people about themselves and about issues directly affecting them, we need to involve them in every step of the process by helping them empower themselves with support from peers and allowing their voices to be heard. Check out TYPF’s twitter page to see what their up to, it’s definitely worth a look!