Kyauta Giwa is the Executive Director of Community Action for Popular Participation (CAPP). CAPP is a non-profit organisation that partners with grassroots communities to bring about accountable leadership and participatory development across the country. The rights campaigner, in this interview with ETTA MICHAEL BISONG, spoke about an awareness programme organised by her organisation to address issues of sexual reproductive health in Yangoji, especially teenage marriage, pregnancy, sexual violence and how the organisation is tackling these vices through community engagement
Background
The event was organised to raise awareness amongst Yangoji community members about issues around sexual reproductive health. Yangoji is a village in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). In one of our key projects; Transforming Education for Girls in Northern Nigeria showed that most girls marry at a very tender age, and there are issues of teenage pregnancy and sexual violence against young girls. This project revealed that there was need to empower this community and the stakeholders for them to understand the purpose of educating their young girls. So we had a discussion with the community to say what kind of issues you think we can do to see if we can have a reduction because it was really an issue that the parents that we spoke with actually talked about. They talked about the young ones also involving in other social vices which actually are affecting the community. They don’t have much educated people and this is really affecting the family system because you have young people marrying at a very tender age and reproducing families thereby multiplying poverty in the community.
We also observed that along the community road the tankers and heavy trucks that are also parking around here, the young girls at night are always hovering around the drivers, and you know that these are also cases that have shown to increase the rate of HIV & AID and other sexually transmitted diseases.
So, this was what led us to look at and designing our programme to educate these young ones about their sexually reproductive health, let them know their body system, how to care for themselves, build self-esteem and desire to be educated. And some of us came here as role models to also show them that it might be difficult getting through education because of governance system but if they can actually get focus and be determined that the future holds better things for them.
And also we have thought of a radio programme, but still in consultation with the community they were the one that suggested that why not a rally to draw the attention of the entire community because not many parents will have time to listen to the radio programme because a lot of them are farmers and business people, so they won’t be able to have time to listen to the radio. So that is why today we are here with a group of students who use drama as a tool to sensitise the young ones in the community.
Motivation
Over the years, we have implemented a project titled: Transforming Education for Girls in Northern Nigeria. And what we did was to set-up girls club in the schools and teach the girls issues of life skills, violence against girls and gender issues. We discovered that the nurses from Abuja University Teaching Hospital were using the girls to sensitise the community on health issues.
Our interaction with the school authorities and community also showed that there are girls who are actually doing well in school but before you know their parents are withdrawing them for early marriage. That was what motivated us and we had an interaction with the community to say this is what we have discovered, is it something that really exists among them and the community admitted that these are issues that they live with.
Challenges
One is the high standard of living and most parents cannot afford to really carter for the number of families that they have and so you find out that because they do not have these basic needs at home, many of them are sent out to go and hawk, many of the parents prefer to use them for domestic activities as against putting them in school which is opportunity cost for the education because if you go to school you will be asked to pay money and the parents do not have these resources.
We have the Universal Basic Education that says education is free; the question then is how free this education is? Because if you talk to parents today they would tell you that by the time you take a child to enroll in secondary school in Abuja, you would be asked to pay between eight to twelve thousand naira. With that how many parents can afford to have their children in school when these demands are being made of them?
Secondly, I also think that as a community, the traditional and faith-base leaders have a great role to play in terms of sensitising our parents. We also found out that most of the parents especially the men felt these were the responsibilities of the mothers. So we also try to talk to them that it is a joint responsibility for both parents to be concerned about the conduct of their children within their homes and outside their environment.
Again the issue of parents shying away from sexual education is also contributing largely to this because in this part of the world parents think these are very sensitive issues that they don’t want to talk to their children, but I tell you as the child goes out, he learns it the hard way as he sees his peers and before you know it the situation has gone out of hand that the parents wouldn’t be able to deal with at that time. We told them that it is no longer a thing to be shy of because as you are shy of telling them as your children it is there all over the social media and even the way people dress.
There are other ways they can learn some of these things and if you are shying away from it as a parent, the effect is that by the end of the day you find out that your child has learned from his peers and then you begin to have issues of teenage pregnancy, rape and other social vices.
Impact
We need to do an assessment of what we have done because one thing that I have also discovered with communities is that once you are there they will point out the issues and agree, but there is need for constant follow up to ensure that something is being done. We want to also look out for testimonies among the community on how the training has impacted lives.
These are some of the things that we plan to do, but like I said, it is a short term project and we are hoping to report some of the things we have done back to the donors in terms of challenges to see if they would be interested in ensuring that we get further funding to continue with the programme.
Solution
First of all, to look at what are the basic needs of the community and how many children are able to go to school.
Secondly, going to school is not about attending school, what about retention and completion? Because it is only when you make education affordable in the sense that not many high fees are charged because of the issues of people completing and cannot go for further studies.
Government should also start looking at the issue of parents having the number of children they can care for because things are hard, the economy is not improving in anyway and poverty is in the increase. We need to ensure that families are closely knitted, increase awareness, have role models in the community and making provision for basic amenities to ensure that people have access to basic things and they are able to be productive.
It also important that government monitors its programmes to know if the end users are actually benefiting from these policies, because it’s not to design them on paper but to look at how beneficial these services have been to the people.