Kenya: Young People Must Shape Their Own SRHR Future, Says Kenyan Activist

Across Africa, young people are being told that their sexual and reproductive health and rights matter. But for many, accessing those rights remains a daily struggle.

Progress on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) has been made by governments and health systems, but this progress is not equal. Many adolescents, particularly girls and young women, still face obstacles to accessing the information, services, and legal protection they need to make informed choices regarding their bodies and futures. Fear of being stigmatized and concerns about confidentiality and who to go to for help can also be reasons why young people are not able to access sexual and reproductive health information and services when they need them.

Millions are still being affected by preventable risks, such as new HIV infections, early pregnancies, child marriage, gender-based violence, and period poverty. The gap between the rights that are promised on paper and the rights that are experienced in everyday life is further exacerbated by the fact that access to contraception, HIV prevention, comprehensive sexuality education, and youth-friendly health services remains a challenge for many.

Young people are increasingly demanding that this gap be taken seriously. They are calling for better access to sexual and reproductive health services and for comprehensive sexual and reproductive education in schools and health centres, free of stigma and shame.

Kenyan HIV and SRHR activist Jerop Limo said that closing that gap means moving beyond simply talking about young people and giving them a meaningful role in designing, implementing and holding health systems accountable.

“The reality is that we have made progress, but that progress is not being experienced equally by young people,” Limo said. “We have more knowledge, more HIV prevention options, more conversations around SRHR, and stronger recognition of young people’s leadership. But for many adolescent girls and young women, especially those living in poverty or in underserved communities, the ability to actually benefit from these advances remains a dream.”

She said the biggest gap lies between what exists on paper and what young people experience in their everyday lives. She said policies, guidelines and new technologies mean little if a young woman cannot get accurate information, afford transport to a facility, or find a service in stock, or if she encounters stigma from a provider or fears being judged.

Limo warned against treating young people as a single group.

Their realities, she said, are shaped by where they live, their economic circumstances, disability, gender, HIV status, relationships, and many other factors. She added that the response has to be much more community-centered and responsive to those different realities.

Limo’s own experience with HIV shaped her path into adolescent health advocacy. She began working in the HIV response eight years ago as a facility peer educator. As a young person living with HIV, she quickly discovered that access to treatment was only one part of what young people needed. Young people were also grappling with adherence, disclosure, fear, grief, relationships and self-worth, and with the question of what life could look like beyond an HIV diagnosis.

Her work has since taken her beyond Kenya and onto the global stage.

In 2025, Limo was recognised by the Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers community for her leadership in HIV and youth reproductive health. But she said the recognition is not hers alone. It belongs to the young people who have shared their experiences with her and the peer educators working in health centres every day.

The platform, she said, allows her to carry their everyday priorities directly to global decision-makers.

One of the biggest lessons she has learnt is that young people do not need adults to constantly tell them what their problems are or what solutions they need. They need people and systems that are willing to listen, trust them and create space for them to shape those solutions.

Today, Limo is Executive Director of the Ambassador for Youth and Adolescent Reproductive Health Program (AYARHEP), a youth-led organisation working on adolescent HIV and SRHR in Kenya.

A central part of Limo’s advocacy is changing how institutions understand youth participation.

“Youth leadership, for me, is not simply putting a young person on a panel or giving young people a speaking slot,” she said. “It is about young people having actual influence over decisions, programmes and resources.”

At AYARHEP, she said, young people are not only beneficiaries but also peer educators, advocates, community mobilisers, programme designers and accountability actors. Limo said that peer connection is one of the strongest tools youth-led groups have.

“There is something very powerful about a young person sitting with another young person and saying, ‘I understand what you are going through,'” she said. That peer connection, she said, can open conversations that may not happen in a formal institution.

Youth-led organisations also tend to sit closer to the realities of communities, she added. They hear first when a service is failing, when a product is unavailable, when a young person is too afraid to visit a facility, or when a national policy is failing to translate into meaningful change at community level. However, Limo said that youth-led organisations cannot be expected to carry the responsibility alone. Governments, donors and larger institutions need to recognise young people’s expertise and provide the resources needed for youth-led organisations to lead at scale.

Misinformation is a growing concern too.

The challenge is particularly acute in an environment where misinformation and opposition to SRHR continue to shape what young people hear and believe. Young people need information that is accurate, understandable, relevant to their realities and delivered through channels they actually use and trust.

AYARHEP uses peer engagement, community dialogues, social media and youth-friendly spaces to allow young people to ask questions without fear of judgement. The organisation also engages caregivers, teachers, health workers, community leaders and other gatekeepers because young people’s SRHR needs cannot be separated from the communities around them. Creating an enabling environment is essential, said Limo.

Limo said misinformation must be countered without shaming those who believe it. “If we want young people to trust us, we have to create spaces where they can say, ‘I heard this, is it true?’ and receive a respectful answer,” she said.

Digital platforms have become increasingly important in the HIV and SRHR response, but Limo believes that young people should not only consume information online. They should also have the skills to identify misinformation and make informed decisions.

Limo said that stigma remains one of the biggest barriers preventing young people from accessing care. It surrounds HIV, sexuality, contraception, pregnancy and abortion, and extends to young people simply wanting to make decisions about their own bodies.

She said practical challenges, including services that are not youth-friendly, inconvenient operating hours, stock-outs, transport costs, lack of confidentiality and judgmental providers, can further discourage young people from seeking care.

Limo also said another major challenge is the information gap.

Young people today can reach enormous amounts of information, she said, but not all of it is accurate.”Access to information has to mean access to trusted, evidence-based and understandable information,” she said.

For Limo, one of the most urgent issues is ensuring that the incredible progress we are seeing in HIV prevention science actually reaches the people who need it. She cited lenacapavir, an injection that protects against HIV for six months and is given twice a year. Kenya became the first country in East Africa to roll it out in February. Limo said clinical studies show it can be up to 96% effective.

For many young women, she said, taking a pill every single day is hard to keep up, so an option they need only twice a year gives them real choice and more control over their own protection.

The rollout has begun in 15 high-burden counties, with plans to expand to all 47.

“Making the injection free at public health facilities isn’t enough,” Limo said. The next hurdle is ensuring that adolescent girls and young women know about the injection, can obtain it locally, and feel safe asking for it without judgment.

Young people as decision-makers

Limo said meaningful participation means far more than consultation. Young people, she argued, should be involved at every stage: identifying the problem, designing the response, implementing it, monitoring it, and holding institutions accountable.

“Young people are experts in their own lived realities,” she said.

Even a team of highly experienced technical experts can produce an excellent programme on paper, she said, but if young people are not part of designing it, they can still miss important realities about how it will work in someone’s life.

At AYARHEP, she said, the value of this approach has been clear through community scorecards, peer-led programming, youth support groups and community dialogues. Young people can tell you not only whether a programme is reaching them, but whether it is actually working for them.

Limo believes the question should therefore change. “We need to move from asking, ‘How can we involve young people?’ to asking, ‘What decisions should young people have power over?'” she said.

What frustrates Limo most is when young people’s participation stops at the conversation.

She said conferences and policy dialogues matter, and that she values every opportunity to be in those rooms. They are where community realities reach decision-makers directly, and many of the partnership discussions most important to her work begin there.

“My frustration is when young people speak, our quotes go into a report, and we are not included in the discussions and decisions on the next steps,” she said.

Young people are often described as the leaders of tomorrow, Limo said, but they are already leading today. They are implementing programmes, mobilising communities, collecting evidence, shaping policies and creating solutions.

Sustained youth leadership, she added, needs sustained investment. Partners and funders can work with advocates who keep showing up and delivering results when they invest in young leaders.

“The opportunity now is to move from youth visibility to youth investment by bringing young people in early and keeping them in the process, from design through to accountability,” she said.

Funding under strain

The push for meaningful youth leadership comes at a difficult time for HIV and SRHR programmes, as funding pressures affect community-based organisations across Africa.

Funding pressure is being felt most directly at the community level, she said. When funding shrinks, it is not just an organisational budget that changes.

“We have seen fewer community activities, fewer peer educators, reduced outreach, fewer spaces for young people to access psychosocial support and less capacity for youth-led organisations to hold systems accountable,” she said.

Limo said there is a contradiction in asking communities to take greater ownership of the HIV and SRHR response while the organisations rooted in those communities struggle to survive.

“We need to stop seeing youth-led and community-based organisations as temporary project implementers,” she said. “They are part of the infrastructure of the response. Communities built the response.”

Sustaining that infrastructure, she said, will require longer-term and more flexible funding, investment in organisational capacity, and genuine recognition that communities hold expertise that cannot simply be replaced.

“We also need to protect the gains we have made. We cannot keep rebuilding community systems every time a funding cycle changes,” said Limo.

A call to policymakers and funders

For policymakers and funders, Limo said, is to listen differently.

She said that young people need more than programmes designed for them. They need the opportunities, resources and decision-making power to help design and lead those programmes themselves.

She urged decision-makers to recognise that young people’s priorities do not always fit neatly into programme categories. HIV, mental health, education, economic empowerment, relationships, violence, SRHR and digital safety are interconnected in a young person’s life, she explained, and responses need to reflect that.

She also urged decision-makers to invest in choice.

She pointed to the exciting scientific developments in HIV prevention, but said innovation only becomes meaningful when communities can access it, understand their options, and make informed choices about what works for them.

Limo asked funders not to stop at paying for activities.

“Invest in the people and organisations that make the activity possible, the young leaders, peer educators, community organisations and networks that remain in communities long after a particular project has ended,” she said.

What gives Limo hope, she said, is young people themselves.

She has watched young people who were once afraid to speak in meetings grow into peer educators, advocates and leaders, she said. She has seen young people living with HIV move from simply trying to survive their diagnosis to becoming powerful voices in the response, and young women challenge systems, ask difficult questions and create solutions for their communities. “I am one of them,” she said.

“That is the future I am working towards,” Limo said, “one where young people are not spoken about only as vulnerable populations and beneficiaries, but recognized as people with agency, expertise and the ability to shape their own futures.”

Through AYARHEP, she wants to keep building spaces where young people can access information, services, support and opportunities, and where they can also influence the systems around them. Ultimately, she said, she wants a future where a young person does not have to fight the system to access basic healthcare, accurate information, or dignity.

“And perhaps most importantly, I want young people to believe that their lives can be bigger than the challenges they were born into,” said Limo.