Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture national youth director Deus Lupenga has raised concern that some districts are only focusing on specific sectors such as HIV prevention or family planning only on adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) programmes.
He made the remarks on Friday during a district orientation meeting on AGYW programme held in Mchinji District.
mechanisms. | Brighton Chimsinde
Lupenga said in response to this gap, the AGYW Secretariat developed a minimum package of services designed to be integrated across all AGYW programming.
He said: “Translating this package into practice at the project level has faced significant challenges, primarily due to divergent donor priorities and sector-specific mandates.
“To overcome these obstacles, government developed a cross-sectoral screening and referral mechanism to act as a solution to ensure that AGYW receives comprehensive support.”
The ministry’s AGYW coordinator Baldwin Mkumbadzala said with financial support from Unicef, the Secretariat created a Cross-Sectoral Risk and Vulnerability Assessment Tool to systematically identify the diverse needs of AGYW and facilitate their timely linkage to appropriate service providers across critical areas.
He also said AGYW experience challenges that often occur simultaneously and require coordinated responses across sectors, such as gender-based violence, early marriages and unintended pregnancies or school dropout.
Girls Activist Youth Organisation executive director Richard Batch described the orientation as an eye-opener for the district’s stakeholders.
“The knowledge we have acquired at this meeting will help strengthen our collaboration with government sectors to reverse the situation,” he said.
