FLN Newsletter 10

Moomba Boarding Secondary School held a Health Expo, giving 150 learners from grades 8 to 12 the opportunity to access vital health information and services.

Sepiso Lisulo, FutureLife-Now! focal person, organized the Health Expo at the FutureLife-Now! pilot school. The event, that took place on Sunday, 18 September, focused on providing a range of health services to learners.

School principal Maxwell Nyirenda officially opened the Health Expo by informing the learners that this would give them a rare opportunity to obtain critical information to help them make safe and healthy decisions regarding their future. The event was tailored in such a way that learners were provided with and given access to integrated, comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services.

Learners broke into six groups, and then engaged in activities and accessed information at each of the six health stations. The issues addressed at the stations included STIs and HIV screening;

As part of the FutureLife-Now! programme, Nashville High School has implemented many initiatives to empower young people on issues around health, education and development. One particular initiative has been to use clubs to encourage and enable youth agency. The most successful of these is the FutureLife-Now! Leadership Club.

Club chairperson, Calton Nemutenzi, was inspired by FutureLife-Now! to use his “power within” to think of a way to implement his knowledge for the benefit of many. He and a group of fellow learners noticed that many farmers in their area were keeping rabbits for meat production. At the same time, these farmers were forced to spend a large amount of money on costly chemical fertilisers for their crops, which created financial challenges.

For Nemutenzi and his friends, a light went on – the rabbits could provide the perfect solution to the farmers’ problems – and so the rabbit urine fertilizer project was born.

Did you know that a third of HIV infections in adults are among young women aged 15-24?  Did you know that women are almost twice as likely to have HIV as men? These alarming facts underscore the urgent need to address societal and structural barriers, including economic and legal constraints, to access equitable HIV prevention, treatment, and care.

In response, the FutureLife-Now! programme in Malawi, through the Ministry of Education and in partnership with the Ministry of Health, developed an HIV manual tailored for use by school health and nutrition (SHN) teachers and youth facilitators.

Both SHN teachers and youth facilitators play a crucial role in transforming the health landscape by providing HIV-related information, increasing access to ART, encouraging adherence, as well as reducing new HIV infections.

“I am so thrilled about the sustainable impact this training manual will have for adolescents and young people.

Members of the Climate Change Movers club at Murape High School in Zimbabwe are determined to fight the effects of climate change by helping empower its members to not only make decisions, but to act on those decisions.

This year the Climate Change Movers decided to step up a gear with their climate change mitigation programme, and work to influence school policy. The club started a new project called, “One New Learner, One Tree, Makes Murape Cool”.

Starting next year, the project will see all new pupils who enrol in the school pledging to plant and maintain one tree on the school grounds. “The idea was borrowed from the Philippines, where every university student is expected to plant at least 10 trees before graduating,” says Michael Jokonya, a FutureLife-Now! peer educator and deputy headmaster. “It is our hope that once tree planting becomes the culture at Murape Secondary,

A two-day retreat for 175 boys from Lesotho’s Motsekuoa High School provided an opportunity to learn, as well as share opinions, feelings, and thoughts on a variety of issues including leadership, good hygiene and sexual and reproductive health and rights.

“The retreat, which took place in September, provided boys with the opportunity to establish lifelong friendships and develop their problem-solving skills in a safe environment,” said FutureLife-Now! health coordinator, Puleng Nthinya. She added that the main aim of the retreat was to empower boys with the skills, knowledge and attitudes necessary to make positive decisions about their lives.

The retreat is an activity of the FutureLife-Now! programme and supports boys by giving them the freedom to talk about issues of importance to them and address their vulnerabilities in a friendly space. The activity was a collaboration between the Ministry of Education and Training, the Ministry of Police and the Safety-Child and Gender Protection Unit,