Reproductive rights are critical to sustainable development: messages from Brazil’s youth for Rio+20

3 July 2012

Source: PSN

While attending the Rio+20 summit, PSN's Sarah Fisher participated in a visit to a community centre where young people where young people were learning about their sexual and reproductive health and rights, as reported in a blog by Nature journal. 

At the same time as governments at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development were negotiating away reproductive rights and some were even questioning the links between women's health and rights and sustainable development, young people in Rio’s Cachoeirinha favela were articulating the reality of what it means to be denied access to sexual and reproductive health information, choices and services.

Sarah made the trip to the favela along with other SRHR activists, journalists and conference delegates, to visit a community centre where BENFAM, the Brazilian member association of an of International Planned Parenthood Federation, provides reproductive health services and holds weekly meetings for local youth to learn about and discuss sexual and reproductive health.

The visit was an opportunity to learn about the great work being undertaken in the community by BENFAM and their teams of local peer educations, as well as to hear direct from the twenty-five or so young people who met with us about their experiences and views about sexuality, reproductive health and other pressing issues for young people living in poverty in Brazil.

You can read more about the visit in a blog written by a journalist from Nature who visited the favela and spoke with PSN’s Sarah Fisher on the trip about the situation regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights issues in the Rio+20 negotiations.