By Kelsey Amos | Communications Coordinator
Early marriage is the leading cause of teenage pregnancy in Uganda with over 90 percent of these occurring among girls who are married before the age of 18. Almost half of Ugandan girls are married by the age of 18, and 24 percent of female teenagers are either pregnant or have given birth already. Shanti Uganda’s Teen Girls’ Empowerment Program aims to arm young women with the knowledge they need to make safe choices and generate empowering opportunities for themselves.
In 2017, Shanti Uganda facilitated 5 Teen Girls’ Workshops, and through these reached a total of 130 girls. We began the year with an in-depth development of surveys and questionnaires by Shanti Uganda’s program staff and facilitators in an effort to increase impact and work with the teen girls to constantly improve our workshops. We brought on Shanti midwife Gloria as our new workshop facilitator, who was able to leverage her knowledge as a midwife coupled with her experience growing up in Uganda to inform and educate young women in the surrounding community. Teen girls’ responses to the workshops were overwhelmingly positive, and the questionnaires we collected at the end of each session demonstrated the girls’ understanding of our learning objectives.
The latter half of 2017 also saw Shanti Uganda hard at work transforming the program as we looked ahead to 2018. We conducted research and held community discussions, brainstorming sessions, and preliminary workshops to determine the best way to continue to educate and empower teen girls in the community. Our objectives for 2018 are to 1) develop strong program curriculum and capacity of facilitators, 2) strengthen the knowledge, skills and capacity of teen girls, and 3) grow our monitoring and evaluation of program success.
Thanks to your support, Shanti Uganda has developed eight Teen Girls’ Workshops which will take place throughout 2018, where we anticipate reaching 250 teen girls in the community. Gloria will lead three-day workshops which focus on the following topics:
We are also beginning a train-the-trainer program this year, which will support improved teaching methods to increase impact during our workshops.
The Shanti Uganda team is so excited to continue to grow our Teen Girls’ Empowerment Program and provide workshops to young women in the surrounding local communities. Thank you again for your continued support and we look forward to updating you again soon!
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