Inside the Youth-in-Health Conference

A conference can be a room of name badges. Ours is closer to a training ground. Over 2025 and 2026, more than 3,000 young people came through the Youth-in-Health Conference to learn how to speak to a ministry, how to run a club, and how to turn a campaign day into a year of follow-up.

Kwara State Ministry of Health sat in the room — not to give a goodwill message and leave, but to take questions from students who had already organised road walks in their own LGAs. That posture matters. Youth inclusion is a slogan until a director has to answer a teenager with a spreadsheet.

What the conference is for

Skill, not spectacle. Delegates leave with a club starter kit in their head: a simple session plan, a contact at their state ministry, and a peer in another state who is trying the same thing. The 1,000+ youth who engaged with Kwara MOH in a single gathering were not an audience. They were a bench of organisers.

• Advocacy labs with ministry staff, not just guest speakers.
• Club clinics: how to run a 40-minute WASH or malaria session.
• A network that survives the closing photograph.

We are not waiting to be invited into health policy. We are already in the communities the policy is supposed to reach.

If your school or campus wants a seat next year, write to us. Bring a problem from your LGA, not just a willingness to attend. The conference is a tool. The work is what you do when you get home.