OPINION: At this time of year, a new consensus must be reached on how COVID-19 should work to improve the well-being of adolescents.

October 5, 2020

Written by Enes Efendioğlu and Souzana Humsi, Committee on Youth and Adolescents, Maternal, Infant and Child Health Partnership

Every generation of adolescents struggles with the difficult transition from childhood to adult life: juggling social and academic pressures at school; coping with changing dynamics within family and friend groups; experiencing the physical and mental transformation of puberty; and making crucial decisions about whether to pursue further education or pursue a career.

This generation of 10-19 year olds is no exception – except that they also have to move in adolescence during a global pandemic that causes unprecedented damage to human health and harms the social and economic fabric of countries around the world.

Adolescents are among the worst affected by the indirect consequences of a pandemic. It has severely disrupted the provision of education, which can have negative effects on adolescents ’social skills at a critical time in their development. When adolescents are unable to attend school, they may experience depression, social anxiety, and stress that can lead to deeper mental health problems, or even push them toward risky behaviors, including drug abuse and self-harm.

With so much pressure on governments to address the direct health consequences of COVID-19, limiting the economics of its transmission and launch, finding the time and resources to address its indirect consequences, including those affecting adolescents, is a challenge.

Adolescents are sometimes insufficiently covered by policies designed to improve their health and well-being, and sometimes they are not advised when interventions are developed in their favor. Recently study, for example, estimated that adolescent health development assistance accounted for only 1.6% of total development assistance between 2003 and 2015.

Occasionally, issues that are important to young people do not have sufficient resources or are not addressed adequately. For example, in some countries, comprehensive sex education interventions may be very limited or actively limited. Many young people are denied access to age-appropriate information to protect themselves from unintentional pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections or to avoid situations where they are at risk. domestic or gender-based violence or sexual exploitation, which also increased during the pandemic. If they do access useful information, they can often find that they do not have youth-friendly services to address the consequences of these problems.

Another major issue that has made working in the field of adolescent well-being more complex than it should be is the lack of a specific single framework for problem solving. This can affect the quality of strategies and interventions developed for adolescents, as having partial guidance, research, tools and documents covering broadly similar issues – all claiming to be relevant – inevitably leads to costly duplication and confusion for developers about the right approaches to take. .

Fortunately, the recent, extremely welcome initiative seeks to reshape the narrative of adolescent well-being and lay the groundwork for improved interventions that take full account of the self-articulated needs of young people.

Following the introduction and adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, one major goal has been to provide access to universal health care to people of all ages, everywhere in the world. The task before the coalition of governments, UN organizations, non-governmental organizations and academic institutions that gathered to support a A call to action for the benefit of adolescents, aided by a new definition and conceptual framework, was to define what adolescent well-being looks like.

The the resulting definition and conceptual framework for adolescent health was published this week in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

The paper defines adolescent well-being as a condition in which: “Adolescents have the support, self-confidence, and resources to progress in the contexts of safe and healthy relationships, realizing their full potential and rights,” and also emphasizes the importance of five interrelated domains:

• Good health and optimal nutrition
• Connectivity, positive values ​​and contribution to society
• Safety and stimulating environment
• Learning, competence, education, skills and employability
• Agency and resilience.

The five domains encompass objective and subjective terminology, and are supported by considerations of gender, equality, and law. Together, the definition and framework provide a new basis for building a global consensus on working to improve adolescent well-being.

One of the key challenges in this process was to ensure that those who have the deepest insight into what this generation of adolescents needs – adolescents and young people themselves – are fully consulted.

As board members representing the constituency for adolescents and young people in one of the key organizations involved in this process, the Maternal, Infant and Child Health Partnership (PMNCH), the co-authors of this opinion are proud to have launched a consultation process to develop the framework.

Conducting global consultations during COVID-19 is challenging because many adolescents can only be accessed online, so additional reach is needed for some marginalized groups, including indigenous youth and young migrants, to ensure their perspectives are included. However, consultations are continuing and under-represented groups will be reached, especially those without internet access.

The framework provides a new way of working, observing the well-being of adolescents through a comprehensive lens, which is even more important in these dynamic and critical times.

Finally, the goal is to have a globally adopted, evidence-based definition and framework that regulates how best to partner with adolescents and young people in designing the interventions they will access and use, as they should be owned by them and for them. This will be presented at the UN Summit on Adolescent Welfare, where partners, such as PMNCH, work closely with Member States to mobilize 2022 or 2023, a midpoint towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals.

Since the launch of COVID-19, we have seen an immense amount of cooperation both within and between countries, such as the COVAX mechanism, an international partnership for the equitable distribution of any vaccine against COVID, regardless of the solvency of any country.

We hope that this spirit of international cooperation will be viewed as a global definition and conceptual framework for the well-being of adolescents.

Not only will such collaboration help avoid costly duplication of effort. It will also allow program managers to plan and coordinate their efforts around specific domains, so that collectively they will have a better chance of achieving more international goals for adolescent health and well-being by 2030.