“From birth, from almost from cradle to grave, girls have been seen as some sort of baggage,” said Shamsa Suleiman, Project Management Specialist for Gender and Youth at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Tanzania. Suleiman spoke at a recent Wilson Center event with USAID MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership about balancing power dynamics to achieve equity for all women and children in maternal, child, and adolescent health, and family planning. Home should be a safe space, said Suleiman. But for many girls, it no longer is. To escape the poverty and pressures at home, including early marriage and other forms of gender-based violence, some girls leave, said Suleiman. “Girls are trying to escape the safe spaces.”

Africa’s “youth bulge” represents both an enormous challenge and a tantalizing opportunity for the continent. With over 60 percent of Africans under the age of 35, governments are under increasing pressure to grasp the “demographic dividend” youth represent to boost agricultural productivity, enhance food security, and expand economic opportunities for young men and women. Each year, about 10-12 million young Africans aged 15-24 enter the labor market, but only 3.1 million formal wage jobs are generated, pushing millions of youth into low paying and precarious informal employment.

“The world is at risk of losing millions of women and children due to reductions in coverage of essential services, reversing hard-earned progress towards the SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals] to date and posing catastrophic consequences for households and communities,” said Dr. Koki Agarwal, Project Director of the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership award, at a recent event on the importance of ensuring continuity of maternal, newborn, and child health services, voluntary family planning, and reproductive health care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The event was the first in a series of virtual country knowledge exchange discussions organized by USAID’s MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership, led by Jhpiego and partners.

In Kenya, primary and secondary school students take courses called Life Skills Education. So do students in Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, and Swaziland. South Sudan adds “peace-building” to the subject title. Lesotho, Madagascar, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia are more direct. These countries add the word “sexuality” to the course name.

Water engineer Gordon Mumbo of USAID’s Sustainable Water Partnership grew up in the small Kenyan village of Kamuga. Year after year, he watched as frequent floods from one of Kenya’s major rivers, the Nyando, disrupted village life. After 30 years of a wide-ranging career in water, for the first time since his childhood, he has returned to his birthplace, where he leads a team building community engagement in the Mara River basin.

“Resilience isn’t an outcome, it is a process—and capacity-building is crucial,” said Chelsea Keyser, Deputy Chief of Party for USAID’s PREPARED program, during a recent event at the Wilson Center marking the end of the five-year project. PREPARED (Planning for Resilience in East Africa Through Policy, Adaptation, Research, and Economic Development) developed 14 different tools to help communities adapt to the impacts of the changing environment in the East African region, including unreliable rainfall and rising temperatures.