By Mabinty M. Kamara
Save the Children International has on Thursday commenced the launching of the Adolescent Sexual Reproductive Health Education App Clubs for adolescent girls across four project communities in Freetown.
The club, according to officials of the child care organization, is to help popularize and educate parents, stakeholders and adolescent girls about the use of the app that has been developed to teach teenagers about sex through the project titled “Mek wi tok bot Mammy en Daddy Bizness”, which is implemented in Aberdeen, Murray Town, Connaught and Cockle Bay communities in Western Area. The organization said the aim is to galvanize young people and communities to ensure that those groups contribute meaningfully to the process of facilitating change for better outcomes for children.
The project is supported by the Danish TV and the app was co-created by students of the Limkokwing University of Creative Technology, in collaboration with the Lulu Lab IT Consultancy Company based in Denmark.
In her statement, the Communication Manager, Save the Children International, Bridget Lewis noted that the project which started in July 2019 was to help adolescent girls be able to make informed decisions regarding things that have to do with their body.
“We all heard the song just now, it says ‘my body my rights’. This means that both adolescent boys and girls have rights to their bodies. They should be in position to say yes or no without any coercion from whom so ever. If you watch this project, it was designed by young people and for young people. This is why we have taken the back seat today to watch them take the lead,” Lewis said, noting that the project is also aimed at changing the dynamics of the use of mobile phones among teenagers.
“Most of our children have phones and they play with it right? They go to Facebook and even whatsapp and so this particular project came to change the dynamic, which means that children will now learn better things from using their mobile phones,” she added.
Mrs Lewis went on to say that the app was designed to suit the Sierra Leonean context, noting that even though the medium of exchange of the app is English, it has provision for a voice over in Krio, the common language spoken by many Sierra Leoneans. This, she said, is to allow all class of persons to access and utilized the app effectively.
Alex M. Sesay, Secretary General of the newly launched club in the Murray Town community, told Politico that he was proud of being part of the club and helping build up other children.
“It’s a good thing to support this initiative. We all know that adolescent girls are more vulnerable than the boys and so it is important that we all come onboard to support each other. Me being a man, I know what our sisters go through as a result of unguided decisions. So I am happy to be part of the process of sensitizing both male and female adolescents about sexual reproductive health and the need to respect the decision of a girl when she says no,” he said, adding that he will be engaging his community members on the relevance of the app.
During the launch of the App, Ramatu Jalloh, Advocacy and Communication Direct of Save the Children International, said that the app was the first ever developed on sexual and reproductive health education for young people in Africa, noting that it has now been replicated in Uganda, thereby putting Sierra Leone on the map.
The program was climaxed with a poem recitation on the rights and decisions of adolescent girls, a musical show on reproductive health education and a short skit on menstrual hygiene, and sexual and reproductive health education by adolescent’s boys and girls.
The launch of the app club will continue in the three other communities in the following days.
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