Jamaica's teenagers get a bigger health team behind them

In Kingston and St. Thomas, the Teen Hubs are where Jamaican adolescents go for straight answers about food, bodies and minds — and that support is widening. An expanded partnership between AstraZeneca's Young Health Programme and UNICEF Jamaica, part of a global investment set to exceed $100 million by 2030 across more than 60 countries, builds on work that has already reached more than 65,000 Jamaican young people aged 10 to 24 since 2020, strengthened youth-friendly services for nearly 20,000 more, and trained 34 youth advocates. The programme also backs the youth-led Fix My Food Jamaica movement, which helped advance the country's National School Nutrition Policy, and the U-Matter text chatline, which puts mental-health support in a teenager's pocket. The focus is prevention: heading off non-communicable diseases (long-term conditions like diabetes and heart disease) before they start.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: institutional program