Lisa Allen-Agos­ti­ni

I'm al­ways ex­cit­ed to meet young peo­ple who are fired up over im­prov­ing the lives of women and girls–es­pe­cial­ly their sex­u­al and re­pro­duc­tive health and rights. One such young per­son is Kizanne James of Arou­ca.

A fi­nal-year med stu­dent at UWI, Mona, 28-year-old Kizanne is one of two T&T young peo­ple cho­sen to be among the 2016 Women De­liv­er Young Lead­ers. (The oth­er is Ro-Ann Mo­hammed.)

Kizanne, in re­sponse to a few ques­tions I sent her via email on the week­end, said, "I ap­plied for Women De­liv­er be­cause of my pas­sion for women's health and rights."

Women De­liv­er con­fer­ences are "the world's largest glob­al con­ven­ings to fo­cus on the health, rights and well-be­ing of girls and women," says the or­gan­i­sa­tion's web­site.

I at­tend­ed the 2013 edi­tion of the con­fer­ence in Malaysia on a me­dia schol­ar­ship and have ap­plied for an­oth­er schol­ar­ship for the 2016 Women De­liv­er con­fer­ence in Den­mark. The 2013 con­fer­ence, the third of its kind, pro­vid­ed an enor­mous amount of in­for­ma­tion on top­ics such as ma­ter­nal mor­tal­i­ty and mor­bid­i­ty, sex work and girls' health. I ex­pect the fourth edi­tion of the con­fer­ence to be even bet­ter.

Women De­liv­er Young Lead­ers like Kizanne get ac­cess to a three-year pro­gramme of skills train­ing, schol­ar­ships to glob­al events and oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ties. She'll al­so at­tend the con­fer­ence in May 2016 in Copen­hagen.

Kizanne holds a BSc in bi­ol­o­gy and is a high achiev­er with over a dozen awards for per­for­mance in aca­d­e­mics and mu­sic, in­clud­ing the UWI Mona Cam­pus Award for Out­stand­ing Lead­er­ship and the Pres­i­dent's Award from the Ja­maica Med­ical Stu­dent's As­so­ci­a­tion. She is vice-pres­i­dent of the Ja­maica Med­ical Stu­dents' As­so­ci­a­tion and founder and pres­i­dent of Caribbean Youth for Phil­an­thropy, which she de­scribed as "a rapid­ly grow­ing or­gan­i­sa­tion work­ing to­wards de­vel­op­ing the Caribbean by pro­mot­ing youth lead­er­ship."

"I want­ed to al­so grow as a youth leader and ob­tain a wealth of ex­pe­ri­ence that Women De­liv­er had to of­fer through the many cours­es avail­able and in­ter­ac­tions with peo­ple who are more ex­pe­ri­enced in youth lead­er­ship," she said.

"They al­so of­fer to their best stu­dents US$5,000 in grant fund­ing to­wards a project of the par­tic­i­pant's choice. I've been work­ing re­al­ly hard to­wards that be­cause of a project I have in mind."

Win­ners of the pre­vi­ous batch of these C-Ex­change Seed Grants in­clude youth ac­tivists from Cameroon, Mex­i­co, Nige­ria and Bangladesh. Their projects show a range of in­ter­ests–from child mar­riage, to HIV and sex work­ers, to us­ing cell phones as a medi­um for de­liv­er­ing sex­u­al and re­pro­duc­tive health coun­selling and ed­u­ca­tion to ado­les­cent girls.

Women De­liv­er's web­site says on the top­ic of its Young Lead­ers pro­gramme, "We be­lieve that the health and rights of young peo­ple de­serve pri­or­i­ty, and that young peo­ple them­selves have the po­ten­tial to be pow­er­ful spokes­peo­ple on their own needs and agents of change trans­form­ing poli­cies, pro­gram­ming, and their com­mu­ni­ties for the bet­ter."

Kizanne has a par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est in work on HIV and Aids and sex­u­al as­sault. "All (Women De­liv­er) youth lead­ers from the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca are a part of the re­gion­al fight against HIV and Aids. My par­tic­u­lar in­ter­est is in the ado­les­cent pop­u­la­tion. We are con­sid­er­ing the ben­e­fits of a re­vised sex­u­al ed­u­ca­tion pro­gramme in schools to bet­ter tack­le this is­sue. Gen­er­al­ly, from this three-year fel­low­ship with Women De­liv­er, I hope to learn how to ex­e­cute high­ly ef­fec­tive out­reach pro­grammes, com­mu­ni­cate ef­fec­tive­ly to­wards pos­i­tive change with stake­hold­ers and to net­work with oth­er young lead­ers who are a part of the pro­gramme."

Af­ter she com­pletes her planned post­grad­u­ate work in fam­i­ly med­i­cine, she said, she hopes "to be­come a glob­al force to­wards im­prov­ing the qual­i­ty of life for women every­where. Be­cause Women De­liv­er is a glob­al ad­vo­ca­cy or­gan­i­sa­tion, work­ing with them will pro­vide op­por­tu­ni­ties to un­der­stand the health needs of women on a glob­al scale and how to ac­quire and ef­fec­tive­ly im­ple­ment the tools nec­es­sary to meet those needs."

She wants to re­turn to T&T in the long run.

"I would love to part­ner with Rape Cri­sis So­ci­ety and oth­er stake­hold­ers and con­tin­ue the fight against sex­u­al as­sault."

Con­grat­u­la­tions to Kizanne and Ro-Ann and all the oth­er Caribbean del­e­gates, and my thanks to Women De­liv­er for its con­tri­bu­tions to their de­vel­op­ment. Young lead­ers are im­mense­ly valu­able. We need in­dige­nous so­lu­tions to the so­cial prob­lems we face, and we have a shot at such so­lu­tions if we bring up these youths to be lead­ers in the ar­eas of HIV and Aids, in­ti­mate part­ner vi­o­lence, ado­les­cent preg­nan­cy and oth­er sex­u­al and re­pro­duc­tive health is­sues.

�2 For more in­for­ma­tion about Women De­liv­er and its cur­rent crop of 200 Young Lead­ers, go to: wd2016.org