SCORA Generation – Tunisia (Associa-Med)

Name of the activity: SCORA Generation

Country/NMO: Tunisia (Associa-Med)

Program: Comprehensive Sexuality Education

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Education

General description:

Based on a peer-to-peer youth education that uses a combination of experiential learning methods, ‘edutainment’ and social media, this workshop consists of delivering one or a series of sessions in different high/middle schools around the country to teenagers aged between 15 and 20 years old about maternal health and access to safe abortion, gender based violence, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV to enable young people to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights.

Focus area:

Peer Education with adolescents and young people on a variety of topics pertaining to Sexual Health

Problem statement:

Caught between strong family ties, religious values and exposure to sexual content through television, the majority of adolescents lack the accurate knowledge required to make decisions related to their sexual responsibility, leaving them vulnerable to coercion, STI’s and unintended pregnancy. In Tunisia, the latest studies have estimated that only 19,1% of girls aged between 15 and 24 are informed about HIV knowing that the age of the first-time sex is around 17 which is an alarming situation that pushes us to take action as soon as possible .

Target groups and beneficiaries:

Teenagers aged between 15 and 21 years old from a variety of racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds are the ones who are the most in need to be provided with values-based education ; an opportunity to explore and define their individual values that will help them to protect their health, well-being and dignity.

Objectives and indicators of success:

– Provide young people with the tools to make reasonable decisions and build healthy relationships
– Help youth delay onset of sexual activity, reduce the frequency of unprotected sexual activities and increase condom and contraceptive use.
– Foster respect for human rights and diversity as a way to reduce stigma and discrimination
– Communicate a positive, life-cycle approach to sexuality
– Help strengthen communication skills and decision-making abilities through including participatory teaching methods
– Provide honest, effective sex education – not ineffective, shame-based abstinence-only programs that usually create a distance between the educator and the young people in order to rebuild trust in sex education.

Methodology:

Before each session the academic program team prepares the agenda and meeting with educators is made to forward to them the content of the session. The media team moves to the high schools to invite youth to the session. The session is delivered according to the standards of peer education trainings under the supervision of TOT and IPET trainers. In each session we form focal points among the students who remain in contact with us and who will be responsible for transmitting this information to the rest of the schools and through health and science clubs that exist in their schools.

Plans for evaluation:

Year after year, We never stopped believing in the importance of evaluation in assessing , at different levels , the effectiveness of our training as it has always allowed us to make changes, improvements, and modifications to effective training methodologies while eliminating those that are ineffective .

Every session starts with evaluating the students prerequisites around the subject via a startup quiz as a way to help us identify the gaps and problems to be addressed during the session. (pre-training test)

At the end of the session, trainees are asked to fill in a survey containing questions that should be important “take homes” from the training in order to measure learning outcomes at different levels ( knowledge , skills or attitudes ).

This survey also acts as a feedback to the trainer or the facilitator and the entire training process. This evaluation allows us to know how the participants enjoyed the training, how they felt about the trainers, if they felt the training session was an appropriate use of their time, and, perhaps most importantly, if they felt the subject covered was relevant to engaging them into the fight for the real cause. Thus, it gets easier to understand the loopholes of the training and the changes required in the training methodology referring, inter alia, to the trainers’ communication skills that we may reinforce by organizing additional “basic skills” trainings