An Uphill Battle for Sex Education in Rural Kenya.
Sometimes a student’s practicum experience becomes a personal responsibility to a population.
Alumna Sarah Stevens (’15) spent summer 2014 in rural Kenya, researching ways to teach adolescent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) to secondary school students.
“Many programs intending to reduce adolescent pregnancy already exist in Kenya,” Stevens says, but “there are still rural communities that aren’t being reached.”
In those communities, Stevens found, the situation is dire.
The story begins in 2013, when two students at Jera Mixed Secondary School in rural western Kenya died from unsafe abortions.
Maureen Odour, an alumna of the school, was visiting home when she heard the news. The reproductive health advocate immediately recognized what had caused the deaths: a dangerous lack of SRH knowledge.
So Odour founded a “Girls Awareness Club” to train students to advocate for themselves and educate their peers. The initial cohort of 40 Jera peer educators was enthusiastic but lacked the support to make a sustainable impact. So she reached out to friend and colleague Monica Onyango, clinical assistant professor of global health. Onyango, in turn, engaged her former student Stevens.
Together, Odour, Onyango, and Stevens, along with Kenyan videographer Sandra Ruong’o, created Girls and Boys for Success (GABS) in early 2014. The aim of the advocacy group: build on the awareness club model to spread SRH knowledge in the region.
Stevens traveled to Kenya that summer, spending six weeks conducting research at Jera Mixed. She designed and administered a student survey assessing baseline SRH knowledge; participated in the school’s annual general meeting for parents and school stakeholders; and interviewed teachers, administrators, and parents. She also met weekly with the existing Girls Awareness Club to discuss the structure of the club and design activities, including poster-making and a visit to nearby primary school, where girls from the club taught a lesson on self-esteem.
Stevens found that the need for SRH education was still overwhelming. While the girls in the club now knew more about SRH, only 58 percent of Jera Mixed students surveyed could name male condoms as a method of preventing pregnancy, and only 17 percent named oral contraceptives. A majority didn’t know where or how to access any form of contraception.
Meanwhile, parents told Stevens that teaching SRH should be the schools’ responsibility, but teachers and administrators said they didn’t have the time or training.
Stevens and Onyango concluded GABS would need a full-time staff member to teach the Jera Mixed students—“someone like me on the ground building that structure.” They plan to pursue grant funding to create a salaried position and to continue making GABS an effective force.
“The need is so great everywhere,” says Stevens, “but I feel this personal responsibility now to this specific region, and that school, and those girls.”