One of the CARICOM Youth Ambassadors for Anguilla, Ms. Rochelle Rogers attended an interagency meeting entitled Digital Youth: Improving the Sexual and Reproductive Health of Adolescents in the Digital Era in the Latin American and Caribbean Region held in El Salvador during the month of October 2014. According to Ms. Rogers “the meeting sought to present the current situation of technology use in health services in the region, share experiences, best practices and lessons learned in adolescent health promotion and seek to develop an integrated regional strategy for eHealth”.
The meeting gathered together over 70 persons from various countries involved in adolescent development and included presentations on programmes throughout the world aimed at combating various health issues for youth including reducing maternal mortality, decreasing STI transmissions rates, decreasing teenage pregnancy rates, improving the emotional health of adolescents, amongst many others.
Ms. Rogers was impressed with the technology being used for several projects in the region including youth led health mapping through the use of GPS and mobile technologies; adolescents in Haiti were providing real time data on the risk in their environment with the data being used by NGOs and the Government to plan programmes to address these risks. Furthermore, the meeting discussed how to incorporate social media to aid in behavior change utilized by a project called DoSomething which seeks to have youth partake in projects which improves their community and Project Bedsider which seeks to re-brand birth control to be more youth friendly by ensuring its campaigns are youth developed and led. Several other programmes were presented along with Q&As regarding the challenges in implemented these initiatives.
The meeting concluded with several working groups which provided recommendations for the creation of a region wide eHealth policy. Ms. Rogers is grateful for her ability to attend and plans to incorporate some of the strategies discussed in her professional life as a Health Educator. Ms. Rogers would like to thank all the organizations that made her participation in this meeting possible including the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), CARICOM Youth Ambassador Corps, Department of Youth and Culture and the Health Authority of Anguilla.
– Press Release
(Published without editing by The Anguillian newspaper.)
