HEALTH IS NOT A TABOO

Name of the activity: HEALTH IS NOT A TABOO

Country/NMO: Bosnia and Herzegovina (BoHeMSA)

Program: Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Education. Education on health issues for specific societal groups, either in the form of projects (set of tasks for a certain group over a fixed period of time), events (something notable that happens) or conferences (form meeting about ideas related to a particular topic, usually over several days).

General description:

„Health is not a taboo“ was a highschool camp which brought together students from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The main theme of the camp was „Sexual and reproductive health of young people“, with a special emphasis on the social perception. Camp facilitators were BoHeMSA members, who helped participants make a special approach to this subject.

The students had the opportunity to learn about the basics of anatomy and physiology of human reproductive system, methods of contraception and most common STIs. The project also included several discussions about the topics that are imposed as taboo, where participants could also express their attitudes and understanding of certain concepts.

Before the project, BoHeMSA members passed an educational program in order to get all the skills and knowledge needed to educate the young high school students.

Focus area:

Comprehensive Sexuality Education

Problem statement:

The educational system in Bosnia and Herzegovina does not include courses where students could learn about their sexual and reproductive health, which leads to creating youth-related problems (unwanted pregnancies, safe-abortion issues…). It is very common that sexual health is considered as something we should be ashamed of. With this projects, we wanted to create a friendly community where we could share our thoughts and knowledge with the ones who do not have opportunity to learn about it.

Target groups:

Medical students, Youth

Beneficiaries:

General population, Medical students, Youth

Objectives and indicators of success:

1) Medical students being educated from the field of sexual and reproductive health, with a special emphasis on the social aspect of it. (Indicators: Pre and post education test; Number of activities in which students are involved.)

2) Medical students provide sexual and reproductive health education for high school students. (Indicators: Number of participants in the educational program; Pre and post education test.)

3) Medical students and young people from Bosnia and Herzegovina advocating for sexual education in the school system of the mentioned country. (Indicator: Number of high schools participating in our project and providing their students with our educational program.).

Methodology:

The first step would be preparing and educating medical students in order to make sure they have enough knowledge and experience to provide education for others. They are educated from the field of sexual and reproductive health, as well as communication skills, leadership and youth-related work.

The second step in our activity is to implement the education in high schools. Within this step, we have enough help from our partner – Association of High School Students in Bosnia and Herzegovina (ASuBiH), which has more than 1500 active members, who are always willing to participate in our activities.

The next step would be implemented by the end of the educations in high schools. Since we have already implemented this project, we have collected our data, which is ready to be disseminated to our governmental educational institutions. We strongly believe that young people from BoHeMSA and ASuBiH can make this impact, since we have a huge number of young people by our side.

Plans for evaluation:

Regarding the educational parts, whose goal is to provide knowledge for the target groups, we implement pre and post education test. We think that this is the best way to compare the situation before and after our activity and to show the progress we made.

One of the major indicators of success would be to make a change in the school system in our country – to make sure sexual education becomes a regular course in high schools of Bosnia and Herzegovina.