So far so good and amazing is all we can say about our collaboration with Youth focused Organizations (YFOs) to promote Adolescent Sexual Reproductive Health Rights (ASRHR). After training them in using Human Centered Design (HCD) and participatory arts approaches to advocate ASRHR we are excited to see how the organizations have designed their projects and even more excited to see the different interventions that they are coming up with.
First is Anxious Youth Organization (AYO) whose project is being implemented in the area of T/A Malemia in Zomba. AYO’s work is greatly helping the community, as the chief remarked, “It is great to see AYO promote the use of family planning methods among adolescents in this area, there are a lot of girls who have dropped out of school due to unplanned pregnancies so this will help”.
As they say lessons learnt are nothing if not put into use, applying a HCD approach to designing, AYO tailored their activity around various participatory arts approaches that are common in the community and appeal to them. To get the people into the grove they first performed chioda which is local dance and then through comedy they did a condom demonstration and lastly the main meal- forum theatre. They said that forum theatre provided for a safe space to talk ASRHR which is why they used it and it didn’t disappoint because the audience opened up and discussed possible solutions to the influx in teen pregnancies.
The performance took the audience through a journey of a mother who is offended that a fellow woman was telling her daughter about family planning. To her this was an encouragement for the daughter to be sleeping around. It was great how they got the audience, through participatory arts, to address various challenges that adolescents face in the quest for family planning and various barriers to accessing valuable information like that around mental health.
Can young people freely and honestly discuss SRHR with their parents? For CEPERAM through their research they found out that it is not easy for parents and youth in areas of Mingu, Mindano and Thom Allan in Zomba to discuss SRHR. So, they have embarked on an intervention to encourage open and honest conversations between parents and their children around ASRHR. On their first community awareness campaign CEPERAM used various participatory art forms. Through forum theatre, they addressed misconceptions around sex and they made a fun but educative demonstration on proper condom use. Their cultural troop also performed various cultural songs.
Apart from advocating for open conversations between parents and Children, CEPERAM also facilitated the community to identify peer educators in their target communities. They have so far trained and equipped the peer educators with right ASRHR knowledge, which they have been using to educate fellow youths in their respective areas.
Chikonde Youth Club was also at their best in their first community engagement. They performed various dances and as always there was a play to spice it all up. They did a play using the forum theatre approach which got the audience participate by replacing various characters throughout. The chief was so impressed by the performances that he even called for youth to adhere to the information that was being discussed.
“Thanks, Chikonde Youth club for setting the pace, I would love if your fellow youths here would emulate what you are doing in terms of advocating for ASRHR” said the chief with pride.
Looking back at these interventions that these YFO’s are doing we are excited about two things. How they are using participatory arts approaches in all ways possible and how through HCD they are able to adapt their interventions to target community specific challenges.
