Provide Tech Health Solutions for Nigerian Youth

''… thank you for saving my Life yesterday", a 17-year-old female from FCT-Abuja. (A text message from a girl who has been helped to make an informed decision).

Our vision is to ensure that young people in Nigeria reach their full potential using youth friendly approaches to provide information and counseling on sexual and reproductive health and engage them in positive activities capable of growing their potentials and building their skills.

This quarter has been overwhelming as we have been reaching out to adolescents and young people in various ways as we share one of our interesting moments.

The aim of the MyQuestion service is to help provide adolescents and young people AYPs with sexual and reproductive health information and services on their own terms to help them make informed decisions. AYPs are usually faced with challenges around their sexual and reproductive health but have little or no access to accurate and non judgmental sexual and reproductive information. And so we seek out ways and avenues to reach out to AYPs with the right information and with the MyQuestion Service that is non-judgmental.

We participated in an annual programme organized by UNICEF for adolescents and young people between the age of 10-18 with over 150 participants in attendance. The theme for the programme was " Educating the children for a future without HIV and AIDS".  This gave us the opportunity to reach out to more  AYPs with the MyQuestion Service.

Various activities outlined were made interactive beginning with tips on personal hygiene. At various intervals in the programme, young people presented poems in line on the theme of the programme. The next activity was a quiz session about the transmission and  prevention of HIV. 

The Quiz question was " A recent research on HIV found that young people below the age of 25years have _______ % of HIV prevalence in the world " with options to choose from. A girl provided the right answer as 50%. A follow up question was thrown back to the audience to find out reasons why this was so.

The young people discussed at length, giving reasons such as peer influence, lack of parental care and lack of sexuality education. This bring to mind that young people when provided with the right tools and information are capable of influencing their peers positively, and using the information provided to make informed decisions. This what the MyQuestion service aims to achieve.  After this we had question and answer session, they asked their questions and we provided responses and introduced the MyQuestion service to them to ask more question at their convenience.

During the Question and answer session a boy wanted to know if it were possible for HIV to be transmitted through foods and drinks, if an HIV infected blood was introduced into them.

 Just to mention a few. 

Children and adolescents were grouped according to their ages. One very interesting part was the group discussions where adolescents between the age of 14 – 18 were grouped into four and asked to discuss on the topic “Should young people seek their parent consents to get HIV testing. Why or Why not?” This was very interesting because one would have thought that young people would want to go for HIV test without parent consent, but 70% of the adolescents were of the opinion that young people should seek parental consents before they get HIV testing with reasons such as:

• Parents are capable of providing their wards/children with counseling to be emotionally stable
• Parents can help to be proactive in ensuring that the others are not infected if the child tested positive.
• Parents would provide their wards with support and care needed.
• Parents are more enlightened, therefore, are in a better position to provide adequate care and support to the concerned child/ward.

However, 30% of the young people were of the opinion that they could get HIV testing without their parents' consent as not all parents are understanding adding that they could relate the result to their parents when  necessary. This percentage felt that parents might judge them if they say they want to take HIV test and hence their reasons.

While facilitating the group sessions we careful to listen to the adolescent's concerns so that we can devise more innovative ways addressing their through the MyQuestion service.

To ensure that they understood how to use the MyQuestion Service we had practical sessions demonstrating how the sexual and reproductive health information could be accessed using the MyQuestion Service.

Days following we received calls from participants of the programme.

Here is one of the calls we  received from a disturbed 15 year old girl " If a Girl is in the university and a boy who is in the cult approaches her for a relationship, what should she do?"

Another call froma 12year girl old who participated in the programme wantedto know why people say the phrase "ladies first" in her exact words " is it that girls are better than boys"

We have been reaching adolescents and young people with sexual and reproductive health information in many fun ways and through various media, such as; Facebook, bulk SMS, radio programme, quizzes etc, and we have been getting feedback from young people who have accessed the service and were satisfied with the it.

“I didn’t know it works so fast. Thank you for your prompt response”, a 20-year-old female from Benue State.

“Thanks for your valuable service and counsel”, an 18-year-old male from Ondo state.

We reached over 1400 AYPs with the MyQuestion Service and we will continue to do more. We have been able to do all these and helped more young people make informed decisions through your benevolence.  GRACIAS! to all our donors.