“Every Girl for Any Girl Clubs” is about creating awareness among girls to raise their voices in promoting and defending the rights of girls and living together in true sisterhood as the club gives confidence to girls to stand up and protect the rights of girls in general and rural girls in particular. These clubs are found in four schools GBHS Bawock, GBHS Bali, GTC Njenka and DCHS Bali
These clubs hold once every week where we discuss issues on menstruation, personal hygiene, unwanted pregnancies and abortion. We had this initiative for one year though GTC NJenka dropped out along the way. We intend to extend to other schools as time goes on.
There was a capacity building workshop on the 17th March 2016 at the delegation of Youth and Civic Education Bali Subdivision. We had 38 girls from three secondary school (GBHS Bawock, GBHS Bali and DCHS Bali) who attended this workshop. At the close of the workshop some problems plaguing the community were identified: abortion, school dropout, unwanted pregnancies and many more.
On the 23rd and 24th May we had a follow up training workshop on raising peer educators on the fight against unwanted pregnancy and abortion. The training was held from May 23rd and 24th 2016 at COMAGEND head office, Bali Subdivision.
The objectives of the training were:
To provide an opportunity for sharing and interacting with the club girls and trainers as a way of sharing experiences and learning from the COMAGEND model of Sexual Health Education
To equip the girls with knowledge and skills on how to effectively communicate to young people in the community in order to address the issue of unwanted pregnancy and abortion. and
To provide girls with basic information/facts about human sexuality: human reproduction, anatomy, psychology, sexual orientation, STIs/unwanted pregnancy and abortion.
Participants agreed on the following way forward and recommendations.
After the training, the 43 peer educators were going to carry out sensitizations within the quarters where they would conduct sessions.
COMAGEND was going to facilitate the peer educators with some modest transport depending on the distance to enable them conduct sessions. This would be in addition to some materials needed for training like posters, markers, paper, etc.
COMAGEND was going to make consent forms for parents to sign so that the girls can be given time to conduct sessions during the holidays.
There is need for more time for the training. This is because some of the topics need more time to exhaust all the questions which are likely to be asked.
There is need for more people to be brought on board i.e. parents, local leaders, communities, religious leaders, etc especially on the use of NICT to manage young people’s sexuality
The COMAGEND team should consider holding such trainings more often since there are always emerging issues which they might not know about.
There was a two weeks campaign carried out in fulfillment of one of the resolutions reached during the two days training workshop of peer educators. Various quarters were targeted depending on the residence of the peer educators. We had to visit the following quarters: Njenka, Titam, Paila, Sang, Mile 83 (Alpine cooperative), Mbufung, Naka, and Gungong in bali. In Bawock we were to visit Feumjou, Njamchep, Chiaboh, Young Douala, Netab, and Mbatmadet.
The objective of this campaign is to:
Sensitise parents and young people on the risk of unwanted pregnancy and abortion
Create awareness on the need for sexual and reproductive health education for adolescents
Highlight the indispensible role of child protection in ensuring adolescent pressures are reduced
Propose the use of entrepreneurship as solution to adolescent problems
Those to carry out this outreach are the peer educators of that area and COMAGEND staff. The peer educators did the mobilization within the quarters to get many to attend. During this campaign, a total of 8 visits were made and 300 people were sensitized including parents and young people.