African youths have challenged African heads of state and government to consider the resolutions and observations made during the just ended Africa Youth Forum in Uganda and to institutionalise the African Youth Forum in their subsequent AU Summit and establish monitoring mechanisms to implement the African Youth Charter.
                              
This was disclosed to the Daily Observer by Marcel Mendy, the executive secretary of the National Youth Council (NYC) who attended the just concluded Africa Youth Forum held from the 17-19 July in Uganda which preceded the ongoing African Union Summit in Kampala. According to him, at least 103 African youths representing 37 countries in Africa attended the summit and discussed widely on the theme 'Maternal infant and child health'.

He said several observations, commitments and recommendations were met, tasking African leaders and the AU to live and promote accountable, responsible and healthy lifestyles through peer-to-peer mentoring and youth-adult partnership at family and community levels; to use all forms of youth-focused media to promote attitudinal change toward addressing maternal, infant and child health issues; to prevent and report all acts of sexual and gender-based violence; as well as facilitate access to justice to young victims; and to commit, monitor and track progresses on the implementation of the health provisions on the African Youth Charter and Maputo Plan.

Mendy further disclosed that the youths also tasked the African leaders to integrate scale of life skills and sexual reproductive health education into the school curricula as well as out of school programmes in-line with Article 16 of the African Youth Charter. He said the youths also strongly urged governments to invest in capacity development of peer educators and volunteers, and fund youth-led initiatives and youth centres to promote their participation in life skills and sexual reproductive health, research, advocacy, training and monitoring.
 
He continued:"Africa's future leaders also urged the governments to facilitate access to youth-focused, public and private media to popularise Adolescent Sexual Reproduction Health and create affective mechanisms to fully implement legislations on sexual reproduction health and rights of young people and to further establish youth desks in relevant government agencies to handle youth-health related issues at both local and national levels, and make the necessary budgetary allocation to implement the recommended programmes and plans of action. We also urged our governments to develop specific programmes targeted at improving livelihood and healthy conditions of both mother and child including income generating programmes for young parents."

The forum, according to Mendy, also availed them the opportunity to task the African governments to provide and scale-up the provision of youth-friendly services including mobile clinics and health centres in rural and disadvantaged communities and facilitate the involvement of young volunteers in the process.He finally thanked their sponsors for ensuring that The Gambia was well represented at the youth forum.