Some three years ago I did an article of how an average of 42 young girls were getting pregnant each day in Mangochi District alone. By projection that is over 1000 pregnancies a month. Perhaps it was a COVID effect that revealed how impaired our extracurricular are outside normal academic calendars in addressing sexual and reproduction health related issues.

Two years ago, the media headlined that our public universities, in particular LUANAR and CHANCO alone registered extremely high cases of STIs in one academic year increasing the mark to a staggering 35% in HIV cases national-wide. Perhaps its a deficit in our societal construct that is redefining that success, academic or otherwise, is no longer a projection of intellect and hard work alone, rather a sexual trade. And just so recent with the previous cohort, the halls of the institution we are standing in today had a record of consuming over 10,000 condoms monthly. And that made me question the legitimacy of our policy direction. Let me emphasize, that is not a Malawian problem, its an elite challenge. It seems to me, wherever policy makers go, sexual exploitation follows.

Honourable Members of the Malawian Parliament and fellow Honourable Member from the SADC Youth Parliament, Ladies and Gentlemen these numbers are not just statistics. They are signals. This is a crisis in making. And this crisis cuts across gender. It cuts across class. It cuts across rural and urban. And yes, it cuts across the elite spaces where policies are drafted, indeed, the very space which I stand today.

I must submit, we cannot reduce SRHR governance to condom distribution or awareness campaigns alone. Prevention tools are necessary but they are not sufficient. What we are witnessing is a deeper deficit in how our society socializes responsibility, dignity, power, and aspiration. This is not just about morality. It is about governance. It is about asking whether our education systems, our leadership structures, our economic incentives, and our social narratives are producing citizens who see their bodies as assets of dignity or instruments of survival and negotiation.

If we are serious about SRHR and HIV governance, then we must move from reaction to reconstruction. We must reconstruct social behaviour. We must re-engineer youth engagement frameworks. And integrate our social systems and institutions. Because without social reform, prevention alone will remain a bandage on a structural wound.