Visualisation tools in English and French geared towards improving young people’s SRHR (GFS, CSE & YFHS).
We are happy to share with you the following tools that have been developed by the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in partnership with the Her Choice Programme to assess Girl-friendly Schools (GFS), Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) and Youth-Friendly Health Services (YFHS). The development and evaluation of the use of the tools has been funded through two small grants of Share-Net International. The tools have been implemented in the Her Choice programme countries in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Comprehensive Sexuality Education tool: This tool allows for scoring a CSE intervention along different dimensions with a view to assessing the degree to which an intervention can be considered ‘comprehensive.‘ The CSE assessment tool was introduced in the Her Choice programme in response to study findings regarding the SRHR-related training given to teachers and young people. It was found that the training offered was not sufficiently comprehensive, and that despite important improvements, young people’s knowledge still fell short in critical areas, for example, with regard to gender, sexual relations and pregnancy. The CSE tool was developed drawing on findings of the analysis of existing CSE-related literature and guidelines.
Girl-friendly school tool: This tool scores different dimensions of schools to assess whether or not they can be considered girl friendly. This tool was developed in view of the apparent lack of clarity among different relevant actors involved in Her Choice activities (e.g. school principals, students, community leaders and NGOs) as to what constituted a girl-friendly school, and what kinds of school and community-based measures supported young women’s access to, participation and achievement in formal education. This tool was developed on the basis of existing literature and guidelines, with Her Choice partners providing valuable input on possible locally relevant measures to improve girl friendliness of schools.
Youth-friendly Health Services tool: This tool scores different dimensions of health services to assess whether they can be considered youth friendly. The tool was developed to provide a participatory means of assessment, and one which assumed little advance or specialised knowledge on the part of the users. In the case of the Her Choice programme, the latter was important for a) Her Choice partners, who were mostly more experienced in the fields of education and child protection, and less in the field of health care, and b) local health services, who initially had little awareness of what might be required to increase their youth-friendliness. The tool was thus designed as a spring board and to facilitate discussion of basic aspects of youth-friendly services. In this case too, existing standards were drawn on as well as experiences of Her Choice partners themselves.
Click here to learn more about Share-Net’s small grants.
Click here to see more from Share-Net NL’s community of practice working on CSE.
