A safe and healthier world can only be achieved when the youth are actively involved in discussions around the big issues that are currently facing the world and not only be seen as the “leaders of tomorrow”.

Learning & Reflections from a Fellowship with HCD Exchange - Nzisa Kioko

YLabs is working with AMREF to create digital content to educate Kenyan youth on contraception. Funded by CIFF-Africa, pilots in Mombasa and Homa Bay have tested content to reduce Kenya’s teen pregnancy and motherhood rates from today’s 18%.

Meet Nzisa Kioko

We are incredibly excited to announce that La Ventana has been voted the winner of the Sharecare Award in the Health Activism category 2021. This is a huge win for pleasure-based comprehensive sex education.

From Rwanda to Kenya to Pakistan, check out the stories behind the incredible youth centered and youth driven work being carried out by some pretty inspiring people.

“To me, youth engagement means that youth have the power to innovate and find solutions to their own issues. Our work is to facilitate that conversation and provide them with knowledge and tools to make it an effective and efficient engagement.”

Good design doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In 2020, our Cocoon project team was able to conduct design research and prototyping in the Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement in Northern Uganda despite the incredible challenges that the year brought. Our team codesigned safe, private, and accessible spaces and services for menstrual health management (MHM) and menstruation education. Here are five ways that they were able to continue to lead design work when everything went wrong.

Our team has worked in 15 countries on projects that are centered around young people and the subjects that matter the most to them; sexual and reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, livelihoods, and mental health. Here are the values that define our work, keep us mission-aligned, and shape our partnerships and projects.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, young people are accessing health products, including family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) methods, at local pharmacies. These small businesses are integrated into the local community, offer confidential services, and are led by committed health professionals. Meet three pharmacists who work hard every day to deliver youth-friendly care in Rwanda!

We know that digital self-care platforms will be a critical building block as we work to build a safer and healthier future –  because we have seen first hand how one is working in Rwanda.

After significant COVID delays, YLabs to launching the first randomized controlled trial of a digital behavior change intervention to support adolescent reproductive health

The YLabs 2021 Youth Leadership Cohort will have a platform to share their voice, gain valuable job and mentorship experience, be paid for their time and expertise, and work on solutions to the challenges that matter most to them. We will be accepting applications and recommendations for our incoming Youth Leadership Cohort in early 2021.

At YLabs, we’ve worked with young people, religious leaders, and government stakeholders to understand and explore issues that are typically kept quiet - so conversations about porn, safe-abortion, menstrual hygiene, and sexual pleasure are nothing new.

In 2020, YLabs worked with young people in the US to better understand how they process, prioritize, and seek care for their own mental health. We asked young people how we might normalize conversations about mental health by weaving stories about resilience and care-seeking behavior into the plotlines of popular films and tv shows. So listen up, entertainment industry! Here are three themes that young people said must be addressed:

At YLabs, we love to share our work - from our prototypes to our processes. So naturally, we were thrilled to lead a five-day course in partnership with Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. The course, Creating with Community: An introduction to Human-Centered Design (HCD) for Public Health Intervention Development, was designed to introduce senior public health practitioners to the practice of design.