12/08/2026
August 12, 2026. International Youth Day.
Today, on International Youth Day, I am calling on every stakeholder, including governments, institutions, donors, and leaders, to stop simply hearing from young people and start listening to us meaningfully. Hearing is passive. It lets our words fill a room and then fade. Listening is active. It requires you to sit with our lived experiences, to let them reshape your priorities, and to treat our recommendations not as courtesy consultations but as essential direction.
We need you to walk the talk. That means moving beyond commitments that sound good on paper and putting real money into health prevention. Funding must reach the communities where we actually live, not only the capital cities where reports are written. It means ensuring that medical knowledge and scientific breakthroughs do not stay locked behind paywalls, jargon, or facilities that are out of reach, but remain relevant, timely, and accessible to us.
We also need you to continue pushing for the reform of laws and policies that still hinder us from exercising our bodily autonomy and our fundamental right to s*xual and reproductive health and services. Our rights cannot be conditional on geography, income, or age.
Finally, approaches to young people cannot be limited to a single dimension. They must be robust, built on the principle of creating solutions together with us, and designed to meet us where we are. Whether we are online, in schools, in places of worship, or in the streets, we must be reached where we actually are. We are not a monolith, and the strategies meant to reach us should reflect that complexity.
UNAIDS Asia Pacific UNAIDS Youth Voices Count, Inc. Youth RISE Y+ Global
