FutureLife-Now! Newsletter: Edition 7 2022
Welcome to the seventh in a series of FutureLife-Now! newsletters, designed to share information, good practices and lessons learnt related to the education, health and development of young people in the SADC Region. Whether you are a young person, a teacher, a health worker, a parent or caregiver, or policy maker, we hope that you will find this enjoyable and useful reading.
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An Investment in Youth Agency is an Investment in Social Change || SADC study sees youth driving research on youth agency
The year 2022 starts off on an exciting note for MIET AFRICA. A regional research study on youth agency is being conducted across five countries in Southern Africa, including Madagascar, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The FutureLife-Now! programme recognizes that a key reason for the lack of progress towards achieving the UN’s global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is that youth lack the agency required to engage in responsible behaviours. The “Youth Agency Research Study” is part of a FutureLife-Now! activity that seeks to establish evidence on how to better support young people to exercise their …FutureLife-Now! Learners Ride into the Future || New bicycles add to safety, reduce school absenteeism
Last year, as schools in Zimbabwe prepared to close and everyone looked forward to the festive season, a group of learners at Fort Rixon were in for a surprise that would change their lives. Thirty large boxes were delivered to the school and inside each box were all the pieces necessary to assemble a brand new bicycle. The bicycles were an incentive from the FutureLife-Now! programme. The local FutureLife-Now! team helped assemble the bicycles which were handed over to the learners in the presence of their parents and School Development Committee members on 22 December 2021, …Planting Ideas Produces Income || Future Life-Now! learners see their food gardens grow
Hoes, trowels, and fertilizers were just some of the items that found their way to the FutureLife-Now! pilot schools in Malawi. The equipment, delivered to the schools in June 2021, was provided to enable the establishment of school gardens. The idea of a FutureLife-Now! garden project was a way of ensuring that learners would be empowered and equipped with knowledge in crop farming. Each school received hand trowels, hand forks, rakes, pangas, watering canes, wheelbarrows, hoes, a sprayer, two 50kg bags of fertiliser, 10 packets of vegetable seeds, four bottles of chemicals, and a measuring string. …Change is Here to Stay || Lesotho’s FutureLife-Now! schools reflect on the first two years of the pilot project
Two years after the 2019 launch of the FutureLife-Now! programme in Lesotho, the time had arrived for a formal reflection. Produced at the end of 2021, the aim of the reports from all 10 outreach schools was to reflect on the objectives that the FutureLife-Now! programme had met in relation to its goal of reducing new HIV infections and increasing adherence to ART amongst youth in the SADC Region. The reports from all ten outreach schools stated that through the availability of e-platforms in schools (laptops, screens and projectors) learners have become acquainted with different virtual …Growing In Leaps and Bounds || Income from Naboye Secondary Production Unit ploughed back into school
Of the many exciting activities supported by FutureLife-Now! at Naboye Secondary School in Zambia’s Kafue district, the production unit is one of the programmes that has grown in leaps and bounds. The production unit of the 53-year-old school undertakes farming projects to help the school raise finances. The unit aims to develop farming skills in the learners which eventually result in a supply of fresh produce. FutureLife-Now! has been active at Naboye since 2020 and learners have been actively involved in the many projects that fall under the production unit. “Working with learners has been the …