Publications on Adolescents

Although the AIDS epidemic is now well established into the general population, commercials sex workers and drugs users represent potential groups that can transmit the virus to their clients/partners. Prevention efforts targeting young people should therefore be reinforced and continued. That is the reason why UNICEF, together with UNESCO is supporting the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports for the conduction of a Youth Risk Behaviour Survey carried out on a national scale. The survey will provide key information on risk behaviour taken by young people and will make a new baseline about Cambodian youth. 

Adolescent Substance Use: Risk and Protection responds to young people's call for action against substance use. This publication provides an insight into planning and delivering effective treatment and rehabilitation programmes for adolescent substance users – in the Greater Mekong Subregion and beyond.

Adolescence is a formative time of transition to adulthood, roughly concurrent with the second decade of life. What happens between ages 10 and 19 shapes how girls and boys live out their lives as women and men—not only in the reproductive arena, but also in the social and economic realms. Throughout the world, girls and boys are treated differently from birth onward, but at puberty this gender divide widens.

HIV/AIDS prevention and care is now one of 5 UNICEF global priorities, in addition to girls’ education, integrated early childhood development, immunisation "plus", and improved protection of children from violence, exploitation, abuse and discrimination.

The Adolescent Peer Organised Network (APON) project grew out of a large Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) programme aimed at providing basic education to underprivileged children, especially girls, who have not previously attended primary school.

This Publication is a compilation of twenty six programme interventions, including eight in-depth case studies. It is designed to serve as a resource for policy makers, programmers, advocates, community organisations, UNICEF staff and partners.

At the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in September 1994 and its subsequent review in 1999 (ICPD+5), 179 countries agreed that population and development are inextricably linked, and that empowering women and meeting people’s needs for education and health, including reproductive health, are necessary for both individual advancement and balanced development.

The inter-regional workshop ‘Young people, HIV/ AIDS, Drug and Substance Use in Asia’ organized jointly by the UNICEF East Asia and the Pacific Regional Office (EAPRO) and the Regional Office for South Asia (ROSA), in collaboration with UNDCP Regional office for South Asia, took place in Kathmandu, Nepal, from 18 – 22 March 2002.

The Regional Strategy has an objective of reducing HIV and other sexually transmitted infections among young people aged 10-24, and to increase access to care and support services for those affected by the epidemic by 2003 in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.