Empowering Adolescent Girls through Protect Our Youth Clubs to Keep them in School in Tanzania

• In Event: World Education’s DREAMS Innovation Challenge Program: promoting girls’ education through prevention and response interventions in eSwatini, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania

Proposal

In Tanzania, HIV prevalence rates of adolescent girls and young women age 15-24 are twice as high as those of adolescent boys and young men. Gender–based violence (GBV), social isolation, poverty, discriminatory cultural norms, early sexual debut, lack of comprehensive knowledge about sexuality, and high secondary school drop-out rates all contribute to girls’ heightened vulnerability to HIV.

Addressing these core factors that push girls out of school and increase their risk to HIV requires evidence-based, tailored program content. Applying a human-centered design approach, the WEI/Bantwana DREAMS Innovation Challenge project involved adolescent girls and their mothers/caregivers in creating relevant and meaningful content for Protect Our Youth (POY) clubs. POY Clubs are weekly school-based groups facilitated by trained peer leaders who are selected by the participating members and supported by trained teacher matrons or patrons.

Using the Population Council’s Building Assets Toolkit, WEI/Bantwana conducted a participatory asset mapping exercise whereby adolescent girls and their mothers/caregivers identified the priority protective assets girls needed to survive and thrive in school. Instead of looking at girls through one particular lens or by defining them by their needs, the protective asset building tool is a strength-based approach that considers assets across multiple sectors, how they affect girls’ lives, and how they interact with each other.

WEI/Bantwana conducted this exercise at six schools across the Temeke District with several groups of girls, as well as with their mothers/caregivers. A total of 121 adolescent girls and their mothers/caregivers took part in separate discussion groups so that the girls could speak freely among their peers. The result of these highly active small group discussions and mapping was a series of lists of the protective assets that the girls ranked as most important. These lists were used to inform the selection of evidence-based materials that were included in the POY Club manuals for Form I and Form III respectively. In this way, the sessions ultimately included in the POY Manuals were contextually anchored and reflected the issues and concerns that were most pressing to adolescent girls.

POY Clubs support change at the level of the adolescent—empowering them with information, skills, and support networks so that they can better navigate the variety of risks they face and build protective assets to reduce vulnerabilities. POY Clubs were designed to meet the needs of vulnerable adolescent girls; however adolescent boys were also welcomed as club members. Engaging boys enlisted them as allies in combating gender discrimination and violence in schools. POY Clubs also helped adolescents build soft skills (such as goal setting, time management, communication skills, and decision making) that helped support their academic success and encouraged their ability to pursue their education. POY Clubs were an inclusive and participatory platform for girls and boys to examine unequal power dynamics and challenge gender norms that discriminate against girls and perpetuate GBV.

Author

• Liz Allen, World Education, Inc.