CHOICE 
CHOICE for Youth and Sexuality is a youth-led organisation that advocates for young people’s sexual and reproductive health and rights and for their meaningful participation in the decisions made about their lives. CHOICE aims to strengthen the capacity of young people and youth-led organisations, enabling them to become leaders and change-makers in their communities.
CHOICE partners with international organisations like Plan International, Rutgers, dance4life, Amref Flying Doctors and RNW media - together with local partners, like Reach a Hand Uganda, NAYA Kenya, ARROW, Association Marocaine de Planification Familiale - Morocco, and Bandhu Social Welfare Society Bangladesh to further meaningful youth participation within sexual and reproductive health and rights spaces.
CHOICE run two strands of programming: 1) strengthening youth leadership within sexual and reproductive health service delivery and programming, and 2) mobilising youth leaders within international advocacy spaces.
The international youth advocate programme capacitates young people living in the Netherlands, and connects them with youth advocates working with local partner organisations and platforms their voices in U.N. advocacy spaces. CHOICE youth advocates develop and deliver trainings on meaningful youth participation, for Dutch international partner organisations, the Dutch government and local partners.
My role at CHOICE as a youth advocate
I was accepted into the youth advocate programme in 2017, when I had just graduated from my MSc degree from Utrecht University. The youth advocates were organised into sub-working groups, and maintained responsibilities for example in communications and campaigns, international advocacy training, meaningful youth participation training and volunteer management.
At CHOICE I became familiar with how youth-led organisations are structured and managed. CHOICE was incredibly transparent and open in its processes. Youth advocates were encouraged to understand the inner-working of the programmes and to become involved in how the organisation runs - in order to provide insight into how a youth-led organisation functions as well as the international-development sector at large. To give an example of this, CHOICE involved a number of its youth advocates in their five year strategy development, which was the first time in my career that I gained insight into this process in real-time. I attended the two-day mission and vision development sessions and theory of change workshop. I realised during this time how much I enjoyed strategic planning and how to articulate an organisations’ purpose.
I’d like to highlight two stand out experiences as a youth advocate with CHOICE. Firstly, an international advocacy experience with CHOICE that occurred in April, 2017 when I joined fellow CHOICERs Lewis Emmerton and Lisa de Pagter to the United Nations in New York for the Commission on Population and Development.
To sketch out what this involved: we facilitated a pre-engagement meaningful youth participation meeting with fellow youth advocates to support each other in understanding and contributing to the resolution development process. I delivered a speech on the right to access safe abortion and access to contraceptives on behalf of 18 countries in the Right Here Right Now partnership. During our time in New York, we approached delegations to advocate for increased youth access to sexual and reproductive health and rights. We also arranged a post-commission gathering with fellow civil society organisations to continue to build relationships and strengthen connections for subsequence advocacy events.
The second experience I’d like to highlight is the international training component. We received signification training in meaningful youth participation, and received mentoring and feedback to strengthen our capacity as trainers. I contributed to the development of the A-Z of MYP training manual and was involved in the first pilot training of the training of trainers (TOT) with a youth-led organisation in Malawi Centre for Youth Empowerment and Civic Education under the Get Up Speak Out consortium. During the visit to Malawi, we were invited to the district of Machinga to observe the meaningful youth participation sessions in practice in a rural setting.
My time as a researcher with CHOICE
In August 2017, I was hired as a researcher to undertake an explorative study to understand the barriers and enablers of the youth advocacy programme in NAYA, Kenya. My responsibilities included project conceptualisation, research design, a one-month brief-ethnographic and action-research oriented trip to Kenya, qualitative analysis and report-writing. The study included day-to-day shadowing of youth advocates in the Nairobi office and in the field, interviews with the youth team and supporting adult-staff as well as interviews with policy-makers.
The research trip cumulated in a participatory art-based exploration of challenges and facilitators of youth participation in SRHR advocacy. The workshop employed human-centred design methodologies. The purpose of this was to stimulate deepening the understanding of the research findings and create a visual representative of the perceptions of barriers and enablers experienced by the youth advocates.
