Zimbabwe: Kwekwe City Council Adolescents Programme on Sexual and Reproductive Health

Kwekwe City Council came with this project as a preventive programme aiming at protecting Adolescents from contraction of HIV. This practice also falls into Nation HIV plan which is advocating for Zero new infections. The motivation is that the Adolescents are the future and Kwekwe City have to ensure that they have optimum good health so that they can be able to fit as great leaders who are responsible, These adolescents  can be role models that ca also convince the nation that  it is possible to prevent HIV. The project is highly innovative in that it is a solution to Sexual problems such as child prostitution, premature motherhood, sexual abuse, gender based violence and it desires to mould young men into responsible men who can never abuse females, who stand up against gender based violence and who will always practice and negotiate for safer sex.

This project targets to promote adoption of safer sexual and reproduction health practices among young people, to increase availability, access and utilization of friendly Sexual and reproductive Health services by young people, to create a safe and supportive environment for addressing sexual reproductive health issues for young people and to strengthen coordination and partnerships for evidence based on ASRH programming.

The programme also have some activities to be carried out during the course of implementation. One of the activities is behaviour change communication where would have a training programme of adolescents in the form of workshops. This would be an opportunity to impart knowledge on sexual health and HIV to the youth in an effort to empower the adolescents with good decision making on sexual matters. Life skills and livelihoods is also another activity carried out by Kwekwe City. The students would be taken through entrepreneur courses that will empower them on how to monitor small business to earn a better living. This activity would be done in collaboration with the ministry of Woman affairs.

The project has benefited about 4550 women in total. Direct beneficiaries reached a number of 1 450, indirect beneficiaries 3400 and of the online beneficiaries the project reached about 933 .In total the project has 10 283 beneficiaries.  The Kwekwe City Council has a gender specific amount of $3000.For Gender mainstreaming projects it allocated an amount of $120000.In kind contributions by the partners amounted to $37000.The total budget for this project was $162 000.

Kwekwe City council have faced a multiple of challenges which includes young girls who are falling pregnant and they are having black market abortions. The health workers are not allowed to conduct HIV testing of the children below 16 years without the permission of their parents. Standard monitoring and evaluation system has also been a key challenge. Only a few tools are being used for data collection and this has made monitoring and evaluation of the programme more difficult.The programme is again highly dependent on a big budget and it is difficult to run without the help from partners. The attitudes of some health staff make it difficult for the youth to access family planning and sexual health services stigmatisation of the adolescences seeking family planning and sexual health services.

To overcome these challenges, The Council had to engage local stakeholders so that the programme will be locally appreciated. On resources, if the donor funds are revoked the local authority and its stakeholders will be able to sustain the programme. To mitigate shortage of staff, the council had to train more health staff which was done in collaboration with the ZNFPC and new data capturing tools are in the process of being produced.

Juliet Dicha says ‘I am very happy as a council employee that I managed to be assisted with my upgrade programme were council loaned me money for fees and i managed to finish my Local governance degree at Midlands State University (MSU).” Women are now being selected into decision making positions e.g. school development committees as well as health centre committees. In a total of 102 health centre comities that are in charge of the 4 health centres 77 of those members are woman. Men are now seen improving in caring of the sick in the HIV programme. They are now also more supportive in caring for their spouses and their children. On household level, there is a positive improvement. Men are now seen accompanying their wives for antenatal services as well as HIV and testing services. There is now economic empowerment of women. They are now being allowed to engage into income generating projects yet it was different story in the past 5 years.  Men have a full appreciation of women. The negative attitudes against women are slowly changing for the positive. Men are now casting their votes on critical decision making positions e.g. the Chair persons for the committees in health. The committee on health is a very critical seat and the chairperson is a female councillor and this shows that the project has been fully accepted by communities.

Replication and sustainability can be done through engagement of stake holders in the project so that the council can rely on local financial support more than donor funding. National Ads Council is already diversifying the program by establishing sister to sister and male mobilisers program. The continual engagement of the community to the program is also vital. The program will be able to be sustained if the community takes the program as its responsibility.