From 12 till 16 October 2011 advocates Paulien and Koen represented CHOICE at the annual conference of European NGO’s in the field of SRHR, also known as EuroNGO’s. This year it took place in Warsaw, Poland. The first two days the main event took place. About 150 NGO representatives gathered to talk about recent developments, had in-depth discussions on relevant issues and discussed the upcoming Commission on Population and Development (CPD) and the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 2014. Paulien and Koen contributed to the program by facilitating a discussion on the civil society strategy towards the ICPD. It was a fruitful meeting which brought together many of CHOICE’s international partners.
The second part of the event was dedicated to youth and was organized by our partner YouAct. 25 youth advocates from all over Europe came together to strategize and to learn from each other. There were some very interesting presentations about abortion rights in Poland, living with HIV and being a sex worker in Macedonia. As we listened to each other, we learned that people living with HIV still have to face prejudices in a developed country as Germany, even amongst doctors. Furthermore, DSW Kenya was kind enough to give us some inside knowledge about the SRHR situation in Kenya. The situation is still quite dire, and some examples were mentioned, including the non-delivery of youth-friendly services and the discrimination of LGBT people. All this made us realize that there is still plenty of work to be done. However, we can only be positive when looking to the future, as the energy realized at the YouAct event was impressive!
