Professor Susan Sawyer (@susansawyer01) was delighted to be a guest speaker at the Kenya Paediatric Association annual scientific conference in Mombasa in late April. In addition to giving a plenary presentation on global adolescent health, she participated in high-level meetings with representatives of the Ministry of Health, WHO, UNICEF, academics and clinicians, as well as young people themselves. Professor Sawyer reported that she was impressed by the commitment of the multidisciplinary leadership group to adolescent health – and particularly challenged by the scale of the burden of disease in adolescents in Kenya. She noted that despite Kenya’s British colonial past, it’s current legal system effectively doesn’t recognise the rights to confidential healthcare for adolescents. This obviously provides major challenges in a country with such high rates of HIV and teenage pregnancy, and very low rates of school based comprehensive sexuality education. A further challenge for health professionals is the lack of attention within undergraduate and postgraduate curricula on adolescent health within Kenyan medical and public health training – which is then reflected in a lack of technical expertise in adolescent health in clinical, public health and research domains. She was pleased to see the extent of local interest in rectifying this. She was also delighted to meet a large number of health professionals who have undertaken the University of Melbourne’s Coursera Course on Global Adolescent Health – who all wanted selfies with her, including the head of the Paediatric Association in Burundi!