Adolescent Health Champions

If India’s 240 million adolescents (youths ages 10-19) formed their own country, it would be the fifth largest country in the world. Yet inadequate adolescent health education, a lack of adolescent-friendly healthcare resources, and deeply entrenched gender inequality mean many youth in India stumble during this pivotal phase, particularly India’s 120 million adolescent girls. 

Adolescent Health Champions (AHC) is building a comprehensive adolescent health platform, with the core being our network of youth health educators (“Champions”) who lead the health education process in their schools and communities while fighting for gender justice. The Elevate Prize will accelerate this youth-driven movement, providing us with a platform to amplify their voices and talents. The funding will allow us to scale our proven health education model, expand our linkages to adolescent-friendly resources/providers, cultivate government partnerships, and shape more adolescent-/gender-friendly health and education policies. 

The funding will catalyze our expansion to an additional 60,000+ youth across 250+ schools in the next two years (virtually/in-person), as adolescents will need significant continued mental and physical health support due to the ongoing devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic. The funding will also support the roll-out of AHC’s mobile app, the first-of-its-kind in India and co-designed with our youth.

I am a pediatrician with a passion for global adolescent medicine. My goal is to utilize my medical, public health, and research training to improve health outcomes for adolescents and reshape trajectories of the most vulnerable and marginalized. I am invested in supporting adolescents because it was a transformative period in my own life. I lost my father when I was ten and was raised by my mother (a physician) and grandmother (an educator). My interest in health promotion began shortly thereafter as a teenage volunteer in India, when I became aware of significant health-related inequities. My dedication has only grown stronger these past 20 years as I completed an MD, MPH from Harvard’s School of Public Health, UCSF pediatrics residency, and NIH/Fogarty fellowship researching India’s adolescent health infrastructure. 

 I would not be who I am without the support I had during adolescence. I co-founded AHC to help youth thrive during this formative period. My vision for systemic change requires more than one person and can best be achieved through a network of young leaders spreading awareness across generations. I will work tirelessly to inspire this same passion for health promotion in as many of India’s adolescents as I can. 

Gender inequality is deeply entrenched in India and is reflected in the health challenges its 120 million adolescent girls face, including: 66% chance of being undernourished/anemic, twice that of boys; 42% likelihood of sexual abuse; 25% chance of dropping out of school after starting menstruation; and a one-in-five chance of teen pregnancy. Due to societal stigmas, information about these topics is often poorly taught or neglected during one’s education. India also lacks healthcare resources to support adolescents clinically. Consequently, females face significant health and educational repercussions in adolescence and beyond.

AHC has built a comprehensive, adolescent- and gender-centric health education platform co-designed with our youth. Utilizing our proprietary curriculum, we cultivate a network of adolescent peer educators (“Champions”) of all genders who lead the educational process in their schools and communities about gender bias and associated topics, including mental health, puberty, reproductive health, nutrition, violence, and COVID-19. Our reach has expanded throughout the pandemic through daily virtual sessions with youth. We channel this newfound health awareness catalyzed by our Champions into positive health behaviors/outcomes. Our innovative mobile application, developed with our Champions, provides adolescents with additional educational content, activities to promote healthy behaviors, and access to vetted adolescent-friendly healthcare resources.

Solving adolescent health and gender disparities in India requires boldness, creativity, and a vision for driving comprehensive, systemic change. In our programming, AHC is one of the first organizations in India to capitalize on the innate voice and leadership of youth as peer health educators. As innovators in gender-sensitive education, we are sparking a transformative movement of youth advocates and allies of all genders. AHC’s ground-breaking mobile app, designed with youth, provides a tech-enabled means to promote healthy behaviors, connect adolescents with support resources, and scale to additional youth.

We are also thought-leaders in building a comprehensive support ecosystem for adolescents at the school-, home/family-, healthcare-, and policy-levels. We utilize a research-based, data-driven approach to drive positive health and education outcomes, using such extensive evidence to shape policy-level discourse. We work closely with health and education policy-makers to identify gaps and build adolescent- and gender-friendly healthcare and educational infrastructure, capacity, and resources.

We are also innovating within our organization, incorporating grassroots, community-based, youth leadership via our 20-member Youth Advisory Board, featuring representatives from our partner schools. AHC is at the forefront of utilizing youth-centered design thinking and meaningfully involving youth at every level of strategic planning, program design, and implementation.

Marginalized communities in India most deeply bear the consequences of gender, health, and educational disparities. For instance, 23 million girls drop out of school each year once they begin menstruating. Our goal is to help break such intergenerational cycles by prioritizing schools and youth of all genders (including LGBTQIA+ individuals) from low-income communities (including marginalized caste and minority religious groups). Through AHC, youth learn to promote their own health, improve coordination with their families, challenge gender/health stigmas, complete their schooling, and delay teen pregnancies. 

We take an evidence-based approach to rigorously evaluate our model and such impacts. We published our findings about our model’s educational impact in Annals of Global Health, a peer-reviewed academic journal (tinyurl.com/AHCJournal). Our results showed our model drove among participants statistically significant: increases in health knowledge; positive shifts in health-related attitudes; and positive leadership impacts. 

Our youth-led approach is also community-driven, as participants eagerly share the information they learned in AHC outside school. To date, our 7,000+ youth participants have catalyzed 73,000+ conversations about gender and adolescent health with their parents/guardians, siblings, relatives, friends, and neighbors. We also conduct sessions with parents/guardians at each school to facilitate their support with their child’s unique adolescent health needs.

To date, Adolescent Health Champions has directly educated and supported 7,500+ youth participants through our youth-led gender and adolescent health platform, including the 2,500+ adolescents who we have worked with virtually so far during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the past year, we have increased the scalability of our model by developing the capacity to conduct our programming virtually, designing and launching our novel AHC mobile app, and leveraging touchpoints like parents/guardians, healthcare providers, and educators to create a more expansive gender- and adolescent-friendly ecosystem around our youth. In the coming year, we expect to directly impact an additional 28,400 youth across 144 partner schools through both our virtual/in-school programming and our mobile app. In addition to its positive impact in schools, one of the most exciting aspects of our model is how our youth internalize being Champions and take action to promote adolescent health and gender equality outside of their schools, amplifying and extending AHC’s reach to their families, neighborhoods, and communities. Our Champions, on average, spark 24 conversations each about gender and adolescent health with their parents/guardians, siblings, relatives, friends, and neighbors, and we look forward to a similar ripple effect from the youth we will train this year.

Our goal is to create and demonstrate measurable impact aligning with: SDG-3 (Good Health and Wellbeing) - 3.5: prevention/treatment of substance abuse and 3.7: universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare; SDG4 (Quality Education); and SDG-5 (Gender Equality). Our participants: 1) learn critical health knowledge; 2) channel this newfound awareness into positive health behaviors/outcomes; 3) build skills, leadership, and confidence to advocate for their own health and improve coordination with their families; 4) gain access to clinical resources and supports for their mental and physical health through AHC’s sessions and mobile app; and 5) help build, and benefit from, a supportive ecosystem, as AHC partners with their schools, incorporates sessions with parents/guardians, and mobilizes youth of all genders (including male allies) to collectively fight for adolescent health and gender justice. 

We have validated our model and published our results in Annals of Global Health (peer-reviewed academic journal), demonstrating our approach facilitates gains in knowledge (+48%) and positive health attitudes shifts (+42%) in program participants. We are currently tracking key health metrics over a multi-year period to understand how our youth-led approach impacts health behaviors/outcomes (particularly mental health indicators), as well as help-seeking behaviors and the utilization of adolescent-friendly healthcare resources.

Navigating the pandemic and recent second wave in India continue to be our greatest challenge. However, the pandemic underscores the need for our work, as youth will need significant mental and physical health support for years to come given the pandemic’s disruption. Unfortunately, adolescent health has historically been neglected by policymakers, and our concern is it will remain an underinvested area. We are working with our Youth Advisory Board to develop an adolescent-focused COVID-19 recovery plan, and the Elevate Prize’s media support would be instrumental in helping us achieve greater visibility with policymakers about the need to invest in adolescent health in the pandemic recovery and generate momentum for youth-centric policy changes. The Elevate Prize will also enable us to invest in organizational infrastructure and remain flexible in the pandemic. We have focused on a hybrid approach, building our online programming capabilities and mobile app to continue interfacing with youth virtually while schools remain closed. Simultaneously, the Elevate Prize funding will enable us to build out our team and infrastructure so that we are prepared to transition our programming back to schools once they reopen and execute on the multiple large-scale partnership opportunities with government agencies we are currently pursuing.

AHC is a youth-led gender and adolescent health movement, built and co-designed at every step with our Champions. The Elevate Prize would enable us to further harness the voices and transformative potential of India’s 240 million adolescents, increase our programming and partnerships reach, and catalyze systems-level change. First, we are excited to collaborate with the Elevate Prize to build media campaigns centering our youth and amplifying their voices. Doing so would give youth an important platform to share their experiences during the pandemic and put a face to adolescent health needs, with the goal being to spark a grassroots groundswell of support for our work among youth across India. Second, the Elevate Prize would help us generate greater brand recognition with potential school and government partners. We have historically focused on developing and validating our model, and now is the time to invest in building AHC’s visibility as we look to scale and expand our youth-led model and app across India. Third, Elevate will help us shape public discourse and build influence with policymakers, educators, and medical professionals about the need to prioritize and invest in our Youth Advisory Board’s COVID-19 recovery plan and adolescent health education, infrastructure, and resources. 

AHC takes a youth-led, multidisciplinary, and intersectional approach to building our team and cultivating talent. My vision for our team is to amplify the voices and impact of youth and support their personal and professional development, especially youth from underrepresented communities. Our dynamic core team is 75%+ younger than 25 and 80%+ female. As we continue growing, I am prioritizing recruiting and developing talented individuals and youth who are: 1) former Champions / program participants, and/or 2) are from underrepresented communities, particularly those communities in which our schools are located.

AHC’s leadership also includes our 20-member Youth Advisory Board, composed of current Champions from our partner schools who direct our peer education model in their schools and guide every step AHC takes (in programming, design, content, impact measurement, etc.) to achieve a healthier, more gender-equitable world. These grassroots YAB leaders come from a wide range of religious groups (such as a Muslim majority all-female school), gender identities, castes, abilities, and socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. The YAB provides a direct pipeline for program participants to deepen their AHC engagement and eventually join our team. I am pleased that 20% of our current AHC team members are former Champions and YAB alumni.

Adolescent Health Champions has the interdisciplinary team and track-record required to drive systemic change and transform gender and adolescent health in India, the country with the world’s largest adolescent population. I am AHC’s Co-Founder and a practicing pediatrician, current NIH Fogarty Global Health Fellow, former Fulbright scholar to India, and public health researcher with 15+ years experience in maternal and child health in India. My Co-Founder is Ricky Sharma, a passionate gender ally who has a background in public policy and business and is a former Harvard social innovation fellow. 60%+ of our team are adolescents themselves, 20% are former program participants, and 80%+ are female. This talented group and AHC’s Board of Directors have multi-sector experience spanning medicine, adolescent health, education, public health, policy, technology, business, and nonprofits.

AHC is at the forefront of youth-centered design thinking and gender-sensitive education. We are thought leaders in youth-led peer education and in building a supportive ecosystem for adolescents at the school, home, and systems/policy-levels. We utilize an evidence-based and data-driven approach at every step, evaluating and driving positive health behaviors/outcomes. We are working closely with the healthcare system and policy-makers to identify gaps and build adolescent-friendly healthcare infrastructure, capacity, and resources.

As the pandemic shut down schools across India last year, I wondered – as health education became more essential than ever, how would we reach youth when our primary access point (schools) were closed? How would we navigate the associated technology and accessibility constraints our youth and schools were facing? I transitioned AHC to focus on understanding the evolving situation, the challenges and needs of our stakeholders, and how we could adapt to best support them. We conducted extensive focus groups with youth, educators, parents/guardians, healthcare providers, and policymakers to first listen and learn. We then utilized youth-centered design to reconfigure our programming. Key steps included: 1) launching our 20-member Youth Advisory Board; 2) transitioning our in-school programming online, supporting 2,500+ adolescents virtually via 70+ virtual sessions; 3) developing and launching the AHC mobile app to deepen engagement with youth and provide access to vetted mental and physical health resources; 4) incorporating a COVID-19 module and augmenting mental health-related content in our curriculum; 5) designing COVID-19 adolescent clinical care guidelines currently in use by hospitals and medical practitioners in India: and 6) conducting research with youth to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on adolescents and recommend associated policy changes.

Harvard School of Public Health Lightning Talk:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwbkLrJhcPA

[Note: In February 2021, we officially rebranded from Girls Health Champions to Adolescent Health Champions. We made this decision after engaging with our youth and stakeholders, collectively agreeing that it was important to adopt a more inclusive approach and catalyze a movement of all genders fighting together for gender justice and health equity. Most importantly, this decision was made at the urging of, and with the full support of, our female Youth Advisory Board members, as they thought the rebranding would facilitate deeper involvement and engagement from their male classmates and would help catalyze broader change in their schools and communities.]

The Elevate Prize will enable us to expand our youth-led health education model to reach thousands of adolescents in India and deepen our support for youth in response to the challenges exposed by the pandemic, including a dearth of accurate adolescent health information, the deepening mental health crisis, and inadequate adolescent healthcare infrastructure. The funding will catalyze our expansion to 28,400 youth across 144 schools (both virtually and in-person), as adolescents will need significant continued mental and physical health support due to the pandemic’s ongoing devastation. The funding will also support the roll-out of AHC’s innovative mobile app, co-designed with our youth health leaders (“Champions”), to these youth, providing them with multimedia educational content and support, activities to promote healthy behaviors, and access to vetted local and virtual adolescent-friendly mental and physical healthcare resources during the pandemic. The funding will also support our ongoing mapping of such adolescent-friendly healthcare infrastructure, providers, and resources, especially for mental health, to continue supporting our youths’ evolving needs during the pandemic and the long recovery ahead. Finally, the funding will enable us to expand the majority-female team of 50+ community health workers and research coordinators who will lead our operations in 144 partner schools. 

Our partnerships with schools anchor our programming, and so we focus on cultivating meaningful relationships with our partner schools and school leadership, principals, and teachers. To date, we have conducted our AHC programming in a network of 20 partner schools across Mumbai. We work with schools not only because they are the primary touchpoints for youth but also because they provide the opportunity to build a supportive gender- and adolescent-friendly environment around our youth. Our partner school teachers and principals have been instrumental in shaping our model, curriculum, and program format, and we rely on their feedback to continually improve and better support our youth. Working in schools also provides us with the means to maintain programming continuity during and across academic years. As we sought to transition our model to be virtual during the start of the pandemic, our principals and teachers were instrumental in helping us understand the challenges they, their schools, and their youth were facing, and so we were able to be more responsive and adaptive in our approach. In addition, we are currently actively exploring partnership opportunities with several government entities across India to meaningfully expand our operating footprint once schools can safely reopen.