Articles
Cradle Mountain
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- Category: Scenery
- Published on Saturday, 01 January 2011 00:00
- Written by Parks Webmaster
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Since the Cairo conference on population and development, there has been some commitment and actual implementation of projects designed to improve the health of women of all ages. The Federal government and youth focused NGOs developed and launched the national curriculum for Comprehensive sexuality Education with the aim of building life competency skills for effective decision making and the prevention of HIV/AIDS. This curriculum was adopted about half a decade ago by a number of states in Nigeria, Niger State inclusive after lots of amendments on the age at which to start implementation, removal of some topics such as sexual orientation, and a change in the title to Family Life and HIV/AIDS education.
The various sates that adopted the curriculum are at different levels of implementation. Niger state however is yet to commence implementation apart from the effort that NGOs such as INCRESE are making to provide young people with comprehensive sexuality education since it was founded using the Behavioural change Communication strategy.
Analysis over a period of 5 years showed that male adolescents were patronizing Centre-based activities a lot more than their female counterparts. INCRESE developed a number of strategies to motivate adolescent girls to come for INCRESE activities. The most successful strategy was developed and tried out recently. The Hajara Usman Girls’ Leaders training which mobilized in-school young girls between the ages of 14 and 18 caught the interest of young girls, school authorities and parents. The advertised 25 slots were all taken up and there were 30 girls on standby list.
The programme is designed to give girls leadership skills, introduce them to sexual rights, gender issues and develop their ability to conduct critical socio-political analysis and develop interventions to respond to inequities and injustices.
The programme provides for regular use of scenarios to re-enforce knowledge acquired and give the participants a close to real life experience through the use of true life cases. Participants are also taught English language which is the official language in Nigeria to enable them communicate and take leadership roles now and in the future.
INCRESE is currently training 30 of the girls who were on the waiting list the previous year and five male adolescents. This was supported by (International Women’s Health Coalition) IWHC funding. As a result of restructuring in the Coalition, they are unable to continue to support the project. The feedback from the evaluation of the previous programme (annex 1) and feedback from teachers and parents show that girls acquired a lot of skills in that improved their academic performance, self woth and leadership skills.
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