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Contributions from
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InWEnt News
Pregnant girls have to leave school
InWEnt defines its strategic aims
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Municipalities are important partners in
development cooperation
Development cooperation teaches
valuable skills
01/2005 |
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[ Reproductive health ]
Pregnant girls
have to leave school
Many African schoolgirls have to give up school because they get pregnant. “Peer educators” inform fellow-students about the consequences and risks of pregnancies. “Tantines”, young women who themselves look back on an unplanned pregnancy and now tell their story in schools, are another approach to the problem.
[ By Ursula Schoch ]
From Rwanda to Niger to Cameroon – for many schoolgirls in Africa, the dream of a high school diploma and university education comes to an abrupt end when the school year begins and an unplanned pregnancy can no longer concealed. The girls then often have to leave school. This is particularly regrettable in countries where girls are under-represented at secondary schools anyway. AIDS prevention and sex education programmes attempt to address this problem. In cooperation with health service institutions, InWEnt develops programmes which are tuned to local conditions to reach young people.
Help, it seems, is needed: the prospects are bleak indeed for a girl abandoned by the father of her child and rejected by her family. Even if she escapes HIV infection, she is socially stigmatised and, as experience has shown, likely to become a victim of violence. In many cases, the only way such young women can feed themselves and their children is to become prostitutes. To avoid that fate, many girls opt for an illegal – and thus very risky – abortion. A number of them die as a result.
Proposals for tackling this problem were presented at a recent seminar in Potsdam (Germany). It was attended by health, education and women's ministry officials as well as students and directors of nursing schools and project workers. The experts from Cameroon, Niger and Rwanda used the opportunity to gather information about the latest findings on the subject. On an excursion arranged as part of the seminar, they also had a chance to see comparable approaches in Germany: at Pro Familia, which operates a nationwide network of family counselling services, at “Kind im Zentrum”, an organisation helping sexually abused children, and at the AIDS campaigning organisation “Aidshilfe”. One of the latest innovations is the launch of a sex education website set up by the Federal Centre for Health Education.
Peer educators
To help guard against unplanned pregnancies and HIV/AIDS, the Kigali Health Institute and InWEnt have developed a training module for Rwanda. Intended for the Anti-AIDS Clubs at the country's schools of nursing, it focuses on communication techniques and specialised information on sex education, contraception and AIDS. The module has been incorporated into the training of 100 Anti-AIDS Club members, making them doubly useful to the health service: as “peer educators” for fellow students now and as professional health workers in the future.
By developing the module an attempt was made to consider the perspective of young people. To this end, a workshop was staged with youngsters from the AIDS Clubs to identify the kind of questions young people ask about reproductive and sexual health. The training unit was developed on the basis of those questions and “pre-tested” on youngsters. The experts decided in favour of this procedure because experience has shown that information developed for but not with young people fails to reach the target group.
Tantines
Unplanned pregnancies are also widespread at schools in Cameroon. The German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) has developed a new approach for a health project to help improve the situation. Since 2004, that project has also had the support of the Health division of InWEnt. At the heart of the initiative are tantines (or young aunts), girls and young women who themselves look back on an unplanned pregnancy and now go into schools to tell students about their own painful experiences.
The témoinage, the testimony, was originally intended to do nothing more than warn youngsters of the dangers of engaging in sexual relations too early. Now, however, many tantines are approached for advice – both in and outside schools. Students turn to them with questions about contraception and pregnancy but also if they have become the victim of a sexual assault.
In such situations, many tantines found themselves out of their depth. So GTZ and InWEnt developed and ran training programmes for tantines to give them the specialised knowledge they need and teach them the relevant communication and consultative skills. Information on methods of contraception and their use is also conveyed and advice sheets are available to help tantines provide factually correct information and point out all the options open to their clients.
Among the counselling aids GTZ and InWEnt did develop is a chart showing what should be done when a girl becomes a victim of a sexual assault or what should be borne in mind after unprotected sex. These consultative aids are published in English and French. Distributed to tantines they make their work more professional and systematic and permit better follow-up assistance for young people.
Parents' initial reservations about the tantines' visits to schools are now a thing of the past. Today, they positively want tantines to come. The perception of young mothers as “loose women” has also changed. They are increasingly regarded as responsible persons. At many schools where tantines are active, the number of unplanned pregnancies has decreased.
Qualifications for health sector workers
Sex education, avoidance of unplanned pregnancies and prevention of HIV/AIDS are also important in the health education provided for schoolchildren in Niger. Here, high priority is given to providing health sector workers with the skills needed to help young people.
With technical support from InWEnt, Niger's two state-run nursing schools (Ecoles Nationales de la Santé Publique/ENSP) have developed a training module which will form an integral part of the institutes' curriculum. Covering specialised medical knowledge and communication and consultation methods for nurses, midwives, laboratory technicians and social workers, the module is preparing school leavers for health service work and helping them handle young people in a more appropriate manner. Teachers at the schools did receive special training at the end of 2004 to prepare them for teaching the module.
InWEnt is involved in health education for young people within the framework of a multi-year project – “Sex Education, HIV/ AIDS Prevention and Reproductive Health for Young People” – with partners in the three countries. One of the aims is to help one group learn from another. The tantines approach, for example, was viewed at the seminar in Potsdam with keen interest by the experts from Rwanda and Niger. Some Rwandan participants departed with the firm intention of trying it out back home.
Ursula Schoch
is a senior project manager specialised in reproductive health in InWEnt's Social Development Department.
ursula.schoch@inwent.org
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