A Lobbying Tool: Film on Adolescents' Rights
Sonu Chhina
The Watchdog
March 11, 2003

On Tuesday evening, just before the crowds from country capitals jammed the UN entrance, former Hollywood and fitness star Jane Fonda released a film on adolescent girls she helped make in Nigeria three months ago. An initiative of the International Women’s Health Coalition and United Nations Foundation, Realities of Girls’ Lives: How We Can Act Now was a unique way of lobbying delegates on why the needs of all adolescents must be addressed in the Plus Five. Needless to say, Fonda dazzled a roomful of tired NGO and government people with just a handshake. As the lights dimmed, voices and images from Nigeria filled the room. Young girls talked about how sex education had lifted the shadow of teenage pregnancy, unsafe abortion, prostitution and child marriage from their lives. How peer education had had an impact. How vocational education had given them the thrill of self-esteem. 

These young voices and those of adults in the community helped provide a palpable link between the language being discussed in UN rooms and the people this language is going to effect. That extra comma, that sentence in brackets, that reservation will change the lives of an extremely vulnerable age-group in societies around the world. The film drove home an important point: The women of tomorrow need not be the same as the women of today. Progress needs to be made and language must move beyond the PfA. It’s been five years. 

The programmes featured in the film are Action Health Incorporated, Adolescent Health Information Project, and Girls’ Power Initiative.