“Advocacy of Youth in the Area of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights and Creation of Youth Friendly Service“

The purpose of our project is to advocate for the implementation of the internationally accepted sexual and reproductive health and rights standards at the national level among youth population.

Project focuses on creation of powerful youth group to work on promotion of SRHR, to establish youth-friendly services.

To reach this aim we plan through seminar-training of the university students.
In the youth friendly service they can get information by phone or electronic contact. This project is the first step on involvement of youth on advocacy of SRHR.

We have trained 160 students from Tbilisi State Medical College N 2 and from Tbilisi Medical Institute “Panatsea”. We gave them basic information about Reproductive Rights and Sexual Health. During this training we have chosen 20 students who were continuing work on these issues; Was created youth friendly service in Women’s Center providing hot-line and e-mail consultations as well as setting up the volunteers network on promotion of SRHR in 4 Universities.

According to the training it can be said that nearly 90% of the students have no idea about Reproductive Health and Rights, Sexually Transmitted Infections including HIV/AIDS; contraception and abortion. The work we have done showed that it is necessary to give information in early ages.

We intend to increase understanding of linkages between health and reproductive rights.

Next step must be implementation of SRHR among health care providers and youth in the regional parts of Georgia.

Our task is to raise awareness through training of the health care practitioners, youth and policy makers involved in health care institutions as well as State health departments to understand the importance of these issues and multidisciplinary collaboration of health institutions with policymakers and NGOs.

We published the book “Reproductive Health and Rights”;

(National Women’s Program Open Society – Georgia Foundation)