By Comfort Ikpi | Project Leader
GPI’s experience in working on issues of adolescent sexual and reproductive health in urban and rural communities has shown that adolescent girls are still vulnerable to practices that affect their health, economic, psychological and social development. Lack of sexual and reproductive health information and services especially in rural communities makes female adolescents vulnerable to sexually transmitted infections, HIV and unintended pregnancy.
Over the past 20 years, Girls’ Power Initiative Calabar has reached more than 10,000 female adolescents with information on sexuality, personal development and life management. Aside community interventions, GPI has graduated over 1,550 girls from her weekly safe spaces programme at the centre. Girls from nearby rural communities often face the challenge of not being able to get to the centre thereby contributing to high attrition rates. As one of the strategies to handle this challenge and to reach more girls in nearby rural communities, a safe space centre was created at Ifondo community, Akpabuyo local government area of Cross River State.
The process of creating this centre began with training of 11 GPI’s Alumni Association (GAA) members and four girls from Ifondo community. These girls were equipped with knowledge and skills to facilitate weekly safe space lessons from May 2016.
Until October 2016, over forty girls have participated in the weekly safe space lessons and equipped with skills to boost their self-esteem and make informed decisions. These girls have seized the opportunity to share personal issues on relationships, reproductive health and career choices. The success of this intervention could have been hampered by challenges such as inadequate facilities and long distance to centre for participants, however, some community leaders provided some facilities and supported in mobilizing participants.
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
