Day 4 in the 7th UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris:A happy ending!

Welcome to the 4th and last day of the 7th Youth Forum live from UNESCO headquarter in Paris.
IFMSA  was missing one powerful member: Our LO to SCORP Nassima as she had to leave the previous day  but the delegation was still as effective as before.
In the morning session, every region had a meeting to discuss the final report written by the drafting committee. After 2 hours of suggestions and amendments, the delegates gathered all together to agree on the final draft.
As I said before” EFFECTIVENESS ” but also “SATISFACTION” were the key words of the day.
I was extremely happy to see that my recommendation for the National Commissions to advertise the participation program in their countries and prioritize youth initiatives was adopted in the report.
We even succeeded to include the recommendations about sexual education and HIV/AIDS to which Joško, our SCORA-D contributed  during the ‘cafe discussion’ on HIV-related issues and AIDS activism. For instance, IFMSA was part of the interview and the article published in UNAIDS website http://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2011/october/20111021unescoyouthforum/
In the afternoon ,me and Josko had a meeting with the HIV/AIDS UNESCO section that were very helpful and open to our questions and suggestions. We discussed new opportunities that lie ahead such as externals for the Regional Meetings and General Assemblies, collaboration on sexuality education programmes, creating a publication of good practices on sexuality education programmes driven and led by youth organizations (hint – SCORA and IFMSA!). They were very interested in that idea that definitely must be followed upon!
Later, I met the people from the Climate Change section and gathered UNESCO interesting publications about both topics.I also tried to get UNESCO send us some hard copies for our next meetings.
Last night and of course last adventures of the forum: Lamia loosing her hat and gloves that she finds back  while waiting for the metro in the possession of a youth delegate from Uganda. Joško experiencing the Magheb culture in a nice Algerian restaurant with Tunisian and Algerian delegates. And last but not least Josko forgetting the IFMSA posters twice in the way to our way back home.  This time we did take the right metro direction :)
Dear IFMSA friends, this is the end of the IFMSA participation to the 7th UNESCO Youth Forum. Being both an IFMSA observer and a Tunisian young delegate was a rewarding learning experience: Exchanging of leadership experiences, identifying youth problems and advocating for change, contributing to the recommendations, observing the intercultural interaction…
The youth forum is organized every 2 years and the delegates are selected by the National Commissions. Therefore,I’d invite all of you to be in contact with your national commissions so that you may get the chance to be part of the next big adventure.
And as s LO to UNESCO,I would like to emphisize on the importance of UNESCO as one of the main partner of our Federation.I encourage all of you to seek for more information about what this UN agency is doing and how you can benefit from it.
Hope you were pleased to read this report and thank you very much for you trust. Also big thank you to my fellow IFMSA delegates Joško Miše (SCORA Director) and Nassima Dzair (SCORP LO) in being part of this amazing adventure and for giving input for the blog.
Your devoted LO to UNESCO Lamia Jouini.

PAHO IFMSA’s Delegation

Dear IFMSA members and friends,

It is with a lot of excitement that we are attending, on behalf of IFMSA, the 51st meeting of the Directing Council of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). Regrouping all the countries of America from Canada to Argentina, the PAHO meeting taking place in Washington D.C. from 26-30 September 2011 is a crucial week of the year to discuss global health issues from a regional perspective.

The Directing Council agenda this week includes safe motherhood and reproductive health, climate change, road safety, harmful use of alcohol, psychoactive substance use, non-communicable diseases, antimicrobial resistance and much more.

Today a new President of the Directing Council was elected, Mr. Franklin Vergara of Panama. We also adopted the financial report and the Strategy and Plan of Action on Urban Health as a first subject of discussion.

Urban health is a major concern for the region of America where the urban population has grown by 187% since 1970. Rapid urbanization can affect climate change and therefore, health. Urbanization is also associated violence, alcohol abuse and tobacco use. Did you know, for example, that the degree of urbanization is higher in more urbanized areas of developing nations due to the greater exposure of urban populations to aggressive marketing and weak regulatory environments?

If you want to learn more about urban health, check out the Strategy and Plan of Action on Urban Health DC51/5:

http://new.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5723&Itemid=4139&lang=en

We will try to keep you updated during the week on each day’s discussions via blog and Twitter.

We are also working on 3 statements and, if everything goes well, we should be able to present an intervention on safe motherhood and universal access to sexual and reproductive health tomorrow afternoon. A special thanks to Nilofer Khan Habibullah for her help and contribution to this intervention.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any comments or suggestions.

Truly yours,

Anne-Sophie Thommeret-Carrière, IFMSA-Québec
Élizabeth Wiley, AMSA-USA
Gabriela Noles, IFMSA-Peru