About YMEP – Young Men as Equal Partners

Tanzanian school boys in Arumeru during outdoors lesson.

The Young Men as Equal Partners programme is based on the belief that young men can play a major role in the promotion of safer sexual practices.

Why? Because in most African societies, men are in charge of making the decisions. For example, it is often men who decide when and how to have sex – and whether or not a protective method should be used. It is also common for men to decide when to have children, and how many. For that reason, women's access to and use of sexual and reproductive health services often depends upon their husbands’ knowledge and decisions.

Young men also have their own unmet needs for information, education and services when it comes to sexuality and reproductive health. If they are to make informed choices about their sexual behaviour, they need to be well informed.

We are confident that this has the potential of reducing the high numbers of sexually transmitted infections like HIV among youths. It may also curb teenage pregnancies as well as induced abortions and its associated problems. The fact that these phenomena are so common in Tanzania, Zambia, Uganda and Kenya indicate that there are unmet needs for sexual and reproductive health information and services amongst young people in this region – as in many other countries in the world.

Some expected outcomes

• Increased access to information and education on gender and sexual and reproductive health, SRH, among young men and women
• Increased involvement and participation of young men in SRH promotion, including HIV/AIDS prevention
• Increased utilisation of SRH services by young men and women
• Increased use of voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) services by young men and women
• Sustainable and integrated YMEP activities
• Enhanced capacity for the integration of gender and sexuality in reproductive health services

Target Groups

• The primary target group is young men aged 10 to 24 years.
• Secondary target groups are adult men, male teachers, male service providers and young women.

	The Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in progress. UN Photo.

How YMEP Began

The idea of YMEP was born in response to two landmark conferences that brought issues of gender and sexual and reproductive health to global attention. The first was the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo 1994; the second the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing the following year.

They inspired the Swedish non-governmental SRH organisation RFSU to launch a reproductive health initiative for young men entitled Young Men as Equal Partners (YMEP). The programme was a collaboration with two other member associations of the International Planned Parenthood Federation; UMATI in Tanzania and PPAZ in Zambia.

The three-year programme ran between 2000 and 2003 and managed to demonstrate the importance of young men's involvement in SRH and gender issues. It also rendered some promising results. Among other things, it increased the demand for SRH education and services, improved the communication and the relationships between young men and women, and reduced the prevalence of STI:s and school pregnancies in the project areas.

Now it is time for the follow-up: YMEP 2. This time, RFSU and its fellow IPPF member organisations intend to make use of the experiences made in the first project and scale up the initiative to include districts in Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya and Uganda.

Goal

To improve the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people at the programme sites in Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya and Uganda.

Purpose

To promote safer sexual practices and use of sexual and reproductive health services by young men aged 10 to 24 years in programme sites in Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya and Uganda.

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