Sierra Leone to Champion Education Plus- a new Global Initiative to Accelerate Adolescent Girls and Young Women’s Empowerment

Sierra Leone joins five (5) UN Agencies, namely, UNAIDS; UNICEF, UNESCO, UNFPA and UN Women in a firm coalition/partnership to enhance a Human rights-based, Gender-responsive Action Agenda for adolescent girls and young women to lead healthy, secure and fulfilling lives while paving their ways to vibrant futures. Through an initiative dubbed as “Education Plus” the government of Sierra Leone will properly and adequately plan and address the essential elements of empowerment that every adolescent girl and young woman should be entitled to in their transition to adulthood. Such elements will include but not limited to:
• Completion of quality secondary education
• Universal access to comprehensive sexuality education
• Fulfillment of sexual and reproductive health and rights
• Freedom from gender-based and sexual violence
• Successful school-to-work transitions and young women’s economic empowerment.
Education Plus is a high-profile, high-level political advocacy drive to accelerate actions and investments to prevent HIV centred on the empowerment of adolescent girls and young women and the achievement of gender equality in Sub-Saharan Africa. COVID-19 impact on Sierra Leone and many other countries has been immense. To build back better societies to include everyone, as we focus on recovery, requires us to acknowledge the gendered impact of this health crisis on the lives of different people and communities and then deploy evidence-based responses. It is therefore reassuring to know that Sierra Leone is the first African country to commit to the Education Plus Initiative, which is a new game-changing drive to respond to the undeniable gender inequalities that put adolescent girls and young women in our countries at greater risk of acquiring HIV, impending school completion and school-to-work transitions. Click on Press Release for more information