On March 8th 2012, JHU∙CCP joins the celebrations for International Women’s Day taking place across the globe. On this day, we honor the many contributions that women are making to their families, communities and countries.
At CCP, we use strategic health communication to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment, as well as to address gender-specific health burdens. Today we highlight several projects that address the needs of young women, and the young women who have been part of our program initiatives.
Amal, Deepika, Flora and Didi exemplify how our messages come alive – positively influencing their lives and the lives of those around them.
Women’s Empowerment Program Produces Community Leaders in Jordan
When Amal Khalf Bashabsha was in sixth grade, she left school to care for her mother who was ill. She married very young and started a family immediately. Though she loved her family, Amal did not feel satisfied. After giving birth to her third child, Amal had a revelation. “It’s my time now,” she declared.
Amal found inspiration attending an Arab Women Speak Out (AWSO) session in Zarqa, Jordan in 2009.
Amal learned to use her skills and began cooking food for local orphans. She also sought to further her education. Her children’s teachers let her sit in on their classes so that she could learn alongside them.
But Amal wanted more.
Amal began holding sessions for neighborhood women in her own home in order to spread the lessons she learned through AWSO. She became known as the “neighborhood mayor” because she was always willing to help other women in her community. To earn an income, she began driving a taxi for local women, parlaying it into a way to assist her community. Amal’s taxi quickly became a safe and welcoming space for women to discuss anything, and the conversations run the gamut, from breast cancer and contraception, to continuing education and improving home life.
Amal is a role model in her community. And she is just of the 60,0000 young women whose lives have been impacted by Arab Women Speak Out events across Jordan and eight additional Arab countries over the past 13 years, women who have each made significant contributions whether they lobbied for changes in their own homes or with a broader reach. In Jordan alone, AWSO has reached over 10,000 men and women over the past three years. The AWSO program, part of the USAID-funded Jordan Health Communication Partnership (JHCP) [1], seeks to empower women through innovative community training sessions by conceiving of a new role for women in society and increasing demand for women’s rights. AWSO has also been adapted for African countries in the form of African Transformation and Tchova Tchova, truly prompting a global movement for women’s empowerment.
Young Adolescent Girl Program Improves Health Behaviors in India
Deepika Varma, a 14-year-old girl studying at Bajaria Kanya Junior High School in Bajaria village, Hardoi district, had never participated in a discussion group or kept a diary. And she certainly never expected to teach her family improved dietary and health behaviors.
All that changed when Deepika participated in the Saloni program.
Saloni Swasthya Kishori Yojna was a program carried out by the Innovations in Family Planning Services Technical Assistance Project [1] in Uttar Pradesh to gauge the impact of a school-based nutrition, hygiene and reproductive health intervention on young, unmarried adolescents.
The Saloni sessions were a novel experience for Deepika. She joined eight girls from her village to discuss topics ranging from nutrition to reproductive health. They were given an opportunity to reflect on the conversations in a personal diary, and encouraged to continue the discussions at home.
Deepika took this message to heart, speaking about the Saloni sessions with her family, friends and neighbors.
She taught new dietary habits to her brothers, explaining that “previously I never ate green leafy vegetables, but now I [understand] their importance and have started consuming them. After explaining this lesson to my father and brothers, they too changed their eating habits.” And Deepika and her friends also modeled good hygiene practices by consistently washing their hands before meals. This positive example encouraged the students in her school to do the same.
Deepika and the 600 young adolescent girls who have participated in Saloni since its inception in 15 schools in 2009 are imparting critical lessons to their friends, families and communities. In addition to modeling good dietary and hygiene habits, these women have learned about reproductive health and have lobbied for delaying marriage until age 18. Their impact is being felt at a household level and continue to filter through the larger social fabric to engender true social change.
Enabling Girls to Stop Unwanted Sexual Advances in Mozambique
With an HIV prevalence rate of 8.1% among girls aged 15-19 years in Mozambique, a rate that is three times higher than their male counterparts, equipping these young women with skills to protect themselves from HIV/AIDS is critical. Though many programs have targeted this population, the Go Girls! Initiative (GGI) [1], a program that ran from 2007-2011 with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief’s (PEPFAR), stands out as a comprehensive program that demonstrated how to reduce girls’ vulnerability. Among its components, GGI included a Schools-Based Life Skills (SBLS) program.
Flora, a student in Standard 5 in Nampula, Mozambique, credits the SBLS sessions for equipping her with the skills to turn down the advances of older men.
Belarmina, Flora’s teacher, concurs. “Before [the SBLS sessions] they [the girls] had no information and several boyfriends,” Berlarmina explains. “Now they have knowledge on how to protect themselves - something that they will always remember.”
Flora used this knowledge when she was approached with inappropriate propositions from two older men. By saying no firmly and refusing their advances, she convinced these men to leave her alone. Flora says that the effective methods taught in the GGI SBLS sessions helped her in both of these difficult situations with men who had more power than she.
For Belarmina the most important thing the GGI program is teaching girls is how to say no. “They should say no and no always, they need to know they don’t have to give an explanation for saying no to men. No is no,” she exclaims fervently.
The School-Based Life Skills program encourages young women like Flora to focus on their studies. Coupled with the other components of the Go Girls! Initiative, programs that led to increased community support for girls (which was associated with delayed sexual debut), increased HIV knowledge, improved adult-child relationships and increased legal literacy, the young women of Mozambique are poised to become a generation of strong, educated and empowered leaders.
Growing a Cadre of Health Communication Professionals in Tanzania
“One of our primary goals when we launched the Tanzania Capacity and Communication Project (TCCP) [1] was to train and inspire a new generation of social and behavior change communication professionals in Tanzania,” says Elizabeth Serlemitsos, TCCP Senior Technical Advisor – Capacity Building.
TCCP is working towards this goal in a number of ways; however, no effort is more “hands on” than the ACE Mentoring Programme.
Didi Nafisa, ACE intern, began her internship in May 2011, one of four women currently participating in the programme. She says that prior to this experience she knew nothing about public health. “This internship has changed my career path,” Didi explains excitedly. “I now want to use my knowledge in communication in the field of public health.”
ACE, which stands for “Advancing Communication Experientially,” seeks to empower recent graduates like Didi, and mid-career professionals in the fields of health communication, communication research and media. Beginning with an intense participatory learning experience, ACE includes on-the-job mentoring and supportive supervision, health communication seminars, online learning, as well as small projects.
Didi Nafisa believes that ACE has given her an opportunity to apply her communication skills in a way that can be “more useful and helpful to society,” for example, by learning to apply education principles to entertainment to transmit critical health messages through the Radio Distance Learning project. And she feels particularly strongly that it has influenced her as a young, female professional, explaining, “This experience [the ACE internship] has made me feel capable of reaching further than what society expects of me because of my gender.”
TCCP staff hope that a byproduct of ACE will be the transformative effect it can have on the field of health communication in Tanzania more generally. Elizabeth Serlemitsos explains that the field is slowly evolving from a male-dominated, medical approach, to one that is more gender-balanced and multifaceted. Indeed, this shift is visible in the first cohort of ACE interns: the mid-career group is made up of five participants, four male and one female; the entry-level group is made of six participants, two male and four female, including Didi Nafisa. Through ACE, TCCP is training the young women and men who will lead social and behavior change initiatives in Tanzania for years to come.
