This week the Lancet Youth Commission members are in New York for a peer-review meeting (Thursday 9th – Sunday 12th July) of our hugely anticipated Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing.
Today’s cohort of 1.8 billion 10‐24 year old adolescents and young adults is the largest in human history, comprising 27% of the global population. Nearly 90% live in low and middle‐income countries where the ‘youth bulge’ makes up to a quarter of the country’s population. This is why this Commission is so timely and very much needed.
Specific objectives of the Commission are:
- To refine the narrative of adolescent health and development in order to integrate new understandings of adolescent health and development from diverse disciplines. This will place existing priorities around sexual and reproductive health into a broader framework of adolescent health and development.
- To define priority investments for the health sector according to country context;
- To synthesize health policy and programming priorities for sectors outside of health including education, legal and justice systems, family transition, and the media for adolescents in the context of rapidly changing patterns of health and development;
- To develop a framework for global measurement and monitoring (health metrics) that will allow the development of country-level reports to inform policy and programming and to be able to hold agencies and goverments accountable for adolescent health;
- To determine a set of priorities for further research and evaluation in the promotion of healthy adolescent development; and
- To publish and disseminate a major new blueprint for a comprehensive and integrated global strategy for adolescent health and wellbeing.
We wish them all the best with their meeting.