 Good morning, my lovely viewers and welcome to Realtalk. I am your host, Eve Nyaga. Are you a parent, a teacher or a guardian? If so, at what age do you teach your child about safe sex, contraception, pregnancy and menstruation? What do you consider a good age to teach your child about sexual reproductive health? You can be part of this conversation by sending in your comments, questions or simply telling us where you're watching us from on e-circuit across all our social media platforms. Or you can talk to me directly on my social media platforms at evandaskonyagawan on Instagram and Twitter and Evelyn Nyaga on Facebook. In studio with me is Grace Onmarwa from G-Activate. Talk to us more about age-appropriate sexual reproductive health. Welcome. Thank you. How are you feeling today? I'm fine, thank you for having me here. Okay, you're welcome. So, tell us who you are and what G-Activate is. My name is Grace Onmarwa. I work for Siasa Place. It's an NGO that engages young people in political issues and I also the chairperson of the G-Activate national movement. And G-Activate aims to give the youth a space where they can discuss about issues that affect them and also try to talk to their leaders about solutions of problems that are facing in their day-to-day lives. And so we've been working with the youth in different counties since 2017 and we've traversed at least 39 counties to talk to young people about their issues. And in 2018 we launched the State of the Youth Report that highlighted the issues that young people face in this country. And the issues were four. There was the issue of employment, there was food security, there was corruption and the other one was housing, affordable housing for young people. So they felt like these are the issues that matter to them and they wanted these issues if they are addressed by their counties or the national government, they would feel like things are easy for them. Okay, so I know those are so many issues but today I want us to talk about reproductive health. So kindly give us, tell us what sexual reproductive health is. So we did a survey this year between the month of April and May to try and get the issues that young people feel are important to them in regarding to sexual reproductive health. And so the survey work was conducted in three counties that is Kilifi, Narok and Homa Bay but we also added an extra three counties Nairobi, Nyeri and Kiambu to try and get, not Kiambu, Wajie to try and get the issues that young people felt were important to them in regarding to sexual reproductive health. And so they were talking about issues to do with contraceptive, some were talking about issues to deal with sex others were talking about how they could do, the issues around abortion. And so this survey was done by Geopol and it is interesting to note that around 62% of young people did not learn about sex from their parents but from the schools. So the parents did not teach the young people about these issues when they were growing up. So they ended up learning them from the schools. And so what we are trying to do is that these three counties that we are focusing on that is Kilifi, Narok and Homa Bay the high rates of teenage pregnancies the high rates of young people having issues around their sexual reproductive health rights. And so we decided to start a campaign these three counties to try and advocate for young people to push for for policy changes in the counties or even just a discussion with their leaders about matters of sexual reproductive health. And so that is the campaign that we are running this year in those three counties, yes. So according to you and your team at what age is the right time to teach young people about reproductive health? We feel that they should be taught this from the earliest point and this is the duty that most parents are not doing. They should be talking to their young people about sex and about issues about their rights. And so you find that also in the survey there was a question about why do you think the parents don't talk to the young people? I was just about to ask you that. It's because they feel the reasons are one that parents sometimes they feel like it's not the right thing to do as parents. The society has made us to feel like it's odd and it's wrong for your dad to come and talk to you about sex. And so the parents leave that duty aside. The other thing is that parents do not have the information or knowledge about sexual reproductive health rights. And so a parent is just there and they think it's the work of the teacher to go and teach this young person about sex. So they don't do that duty completely. And also there was the issue that parents don't have time with their children because the children spend most time in schools. So they are there between six to six p.m. So the parent has like two hours to talk to the daughter or the son. So they wouldn't have enough time to talk to them about these issues. And so they've neglected that duty and it's now the teachers who are doing it. Yes. So and are the teachers doing a good job at it? The teachers are trying. It is in the curriculum. And if we look at the survey there was a question about if young people learnt about these things in school and if they wanted if there could be more classes on sexual reproductive health in school. So there were some were feeling like the classes should be increased. Some were feeling that the classes are enough but still the teachers are doing a part to ensure that the youth and the people who are growing, the young people get this knowledge from the schools. So could you share with us the advantages of learning about sexual reproductive health at an early age? It helps young people make decisions and these are sound decisions because you find like when you look at a county like Liffey it has a high rate of teenage pregnancies and these young girls go into this because they don't have information. And so one of the things that we are doing in this campaign this year is try and give young people information about sexual reproductive health, what they need to know about their rights, things to do with sex because they are doing it at an early age but how can we ensure that they do it in a safe way so that we don't have many young girls dropping out of schools because of early pregnancies. And so I feel like after this campaign that we intend to do in the next three years would get young people that is informed about these issues because information is a key issue for young people and they want to get information in a way that we have not been doing it as a society. The society have been wanting to pass this information through say newspapers, through TV, through radio and most young people in this survey they were asked how would you want to learn about issues about sexual reproductive health and top of them they were talking about social media for those who have gone to school and then for those who did not attain formal education they were talking about TV and radio. And so there is a difference in the class of young people that we have but the main thing is that they want to be communicated to a way that they can understand. And so as we go to the counties we don't go there with projectors to go and tell them oh this is the big thing with reports with a lot of English we go and talk to them about the problems that they are facing and we have to be able to ensure that as a young person you safeguard this space and get the knowledge and information about sexual reproductive health. And so once you talk to them in a way that they can relate it becomes easy and they can push for these changes especially with the accounting government. Yeah, so what about the disadvantages of the same? You know some might argue if we talk to young people too early about these things it pushes them to go and engage in them more. That curiosity. It could be yes or no because I feel like if we don't talk to them and they are doing it or they get wrong information they will end up doing it and that's why we have very many young girls dropping out of school. And so our main aim is to give them the right information and credible information and teach them about the right things about sexual reproductive health. We're not going to tell them that if you've never had sex as a young girl or as a young boy in class 6 now start doing it because it is your right or because you can have it in a protected way. No, we are trying to tell them that if these things are happening of which they are happening how can you ensure that it is in a safe environment? You do not drop out of school or what are the opportunities or the methods that exist for you to ensure that you are safe and you stay in school for until you are at an age that you can now do those things. Yes. So other than teachers and parents who else should come on board so that we can teach young people more about? So also one of the focus is the leaders. So the leaders also play a very critical role because you know county governments with this devolution they are supposed to ensure that the youth of that county have a safe environment for themselves. And so what we are doing is we are engaging the leaders. We don't just go and talk to the youth about their rights and make them become noisy or disturb on or have a lot of information but we also bring the leaders. So one of the people that we need to focus on are the leaders and we are targeting especially the people working on reproductive health in the counties. They are called reproductive health officers. These are the people who deal with issues of sexual reproductive health in the counties and we try and engage them. How can we ensure for example in Homa Bay County the young people have access to issues around reproductive health? If they want to get contraceptives how do they get them through a person who is a medical practitioner or someone who is qualified to give them that so that they don't end up going to quacks or using dubious means like abortion which is happening a lot in this country and they can get it from a medical practitioner. So they are the leaders and then they are the faith-based groups the faith-based organizations the churches, the mosques the religious leaders. We are targeting them because they also have an influence on these young people. So we are also using churches to pass this information to young people that if you are doing this please do it this way. And then there is now we've talked about parents, teachers, leaders, religious leaders there is also the community leaders we have village elders we have chiefs the people from the national government they are also influential and once they pass this information that there is this and this campaign that is going on most young people will come on board. So you said that you conducted a survey what other issues came up during the survey? So the survey was done in three counties and one of the key issues that came out was the issue of contraceptives young people wanted to know more about contraceptives there was the issue about sex they wanted to learn about sex Really? Yes, this was a survey between 18 to 24 young people Before you go on? Oh yes, so that's the age group? Yes, it was 18 to 24 and they wanted to learn about contraceptives they wanted to learn about sex they wanted to learn about abortion some of them were talking about issues to do with early pregnancies what do you do if you are a young girl and you are pregnant at that point what do you do? And even though it was the issue of the parents neglecting their responsibility we also had a question about issues of gender best violence we asked young people what do you think about one of the statements that was there was women need to be beaten for them to be loyal or in a relationship Interestingly, young people at least around 78% of them disagreed with that statement they said it shouldn't be that way it is very wrong and so it was good to see that young people do not find gender best violence as a good thing which is now good because now they will be champions of telling even those who are old in the society that it's wrong for you to have violence on someone Yes So those are the main issues Those are the main issues So how are you planning to make sure that the young people get this information and they get the right means to you know going around these issues So the activity is a consortium of different organizations around 7 and so each organization has a way that they are implementing this project So I would say for example this is a place where our work is to train young people on advocacy So we would go to Homa Bay like last week we were in Homa Bay we were training them about advocacy So we teach them this is how you can advocate for issues around sexual reproductive health in your counties and our focus is to see if they can develop they can push for a policy to be developed by the county government around SRH or even just hold their leaders accountable around issues in that county So like in Homa Bay they were talking about teenage pregnancies and we hope that in the next two years the young people that we trained who are now like our advocates committed that we are going to reduce teenage pregnancies by at least 20% in Homa Bay County So we want to see how can we go around reducing teenage pregnancies So they create a campaign and that campaign there is a way that they are going to see it implemented and if they want a policy we brought in their leaders the leaders committed that they are going to push for a policy to be introduced by the county executive to ensure that the youth in Homa Bay County are safeguarded because these policies provide an opportunity for the county assembly to pass it as a law and so if someone is fond to contraven that law then the legal measures are taken and then we also target other groups like people who are out of school so there is an organization that targets that we also go to schools Kenya Red Cross Youth Department goes to schools to talk to young people because then they have a relationship of entering in schools and they know how they can talk to those children So we also do campaigns in schools and then there are people out of school but they have not attained formal education say people in in circles in chamas like Boda Boda guys we talk to them like in Homa Bay I could mention that Boda Boda guys who are mentioned as the biggest perpetrators of teenage pregnancies because they have quite many yes and they can they can lie to the girls and hey it's happening so we also talking to them how can we ensure that you people are the are the ambassadors of change and the people talking about sexual reproductive rights to the young people so we target different groups using different methods there are those also who do debates like would go and have forums at town hall with the people in the counties the youth, the leaders and the the other stakeholders that I've mentioned to try and discuss how can we go about it okay um you've said that the survey was conducted in three counties in another three why those particular counties so the United Nations did a survey in 2016 and these three counties Kilifina Rok and Homa Bay were leading on issues of teenage pregnancies and sexual reproductive health rights issues and so we decided let us focus on these three counties because there is a gap and we need to fill this gap but the other three in Nairobi Yari and Wajia we wanted also to just feel what are the youth thinking in these other three counties they are not mostly affected by the issues of sexual reproductive health but what are the young people from these three counties talking about so our focus is the three Kilifina Rok and Homa Bay and after the campaign for the next three years we want to see have we gotten some change from the issues that were happening and is there a difference So like you are saying have you gotten any change? No the campaign is we started in April so we are around five three, four months into it and even we have not gone to all the three counties yet so each organization has started in a specific county so like for us as a place we started from Homa Bay next we are going to Kilifi and once we have done the training hours is to follow up there and ensure that if the leaders committed to push for a policy change can they do it if the young people committed to push for their leaders to do something can they do it because we have given them the knowledge we have trained them now it is up to them to do the work and ours will be to support and to follow up and see we told you about advocacy what are you doing so far what have you done so far and how are you engaging your counties to ensure that they push for these changes on matters around sexual reproductive health so we hope that at the end of the three after the three years or after every one year would come and say in Kilifi we have seen a drop in teenage pregnancies in Homa Bay we have seen now the border borders are champions for sexual reproductive health or even those people who give it is called fish fish for sex that women and young girls go and trade sex to get fish from the from the lake how are those people who yes how fish are made in Homa Bay now championing for issues of sexual reproductive health and so we hope that we will achieve that but key that we want to see it is also an attitude change because in most of these counties people feel like sex is not an issue that should even be talked out it's like a tabu it's a tabu to talk about sex so you'd invite a county executive committee member CEC to come to a meeting na nakuliza why are you inviting me to come and discuss about sex so we also need to see if there will be a change in the attitude of even the leaders or if even young people because most young people again they would share away from coming to discuss this issue it's not the best issue to talk about but we need to talk about it and one thing we are doing is to provide them a safe space where they can talk about these issues it's usually really free and there is no kingereza mingi we usually give them a platform for them to speak in a language they can understand and express the issues and when they raise these issues sometimes we might not for example I'm not a health expert but we usually have experts in those meetings and in those forums that if a question comes up and you are not in a position to answer someone else will come and answer from a professional point of view yes just to touch on what you said earlier on you said that deactivate look at other issues in terms of politics there was health what else was there? there was health there was employment and then there was food security and the other one was corruption yes so those were the 4 key issues from 2017 that young people felt were important to them yes so has any of that do you have a campaign on that? yes so in phase one and phase two we were not focusing on health we were focusing on leadership and governance so we went to the 39 counties to try and give young people a platform to talk about their issues it was called deactivatementa so in these forums what we did was to bring the leaders and the young people together and offer platform for them to discuss that in this county say to Rukana these are the challenges that we are facing and as the leaders how can we do moving forward and so we were trying to also collect that was like a survey to try and collect that's where we came up with the state of the youth report that now highlights these 4 key issues so in all the 39 counties that we went to young people were talking about the same issues you move from wasengishu you go to Rukana they are still talking about the same issues and so we were trying to also train them on the constitutional provided mechanisms for them to engage their leaders things like public participation and also how they can ensure that the leaders that they have been elected do their work and so we've also had that aspect but this year we are focusing on health because also health is an issue with young people and young people need to know that these are your rights and this is how you can go about issues around sexual reproductive health mm-hmm okay so should there be changes in maybe the curriculum because I feel like parents and teachers are the most immediate people that can that have access to young people I don't think the solution would be the curriculum per se the first thing is the attitude especially from the parents parents are not talking to their children because of that attitude that nikiwangelesham totuwangu about sex umtotu atanzak fanya izivi and they feel like it's an awkward kind of discussion so we are also targeting parents there's something I forgot to mention one of the groups that we also target is the parents we have intergenerational forums where we bring the old people and the young people together to discuss about these issues so wale wa zeka bisawa mutani wale wa nye they don't talk normally we bring them to a forum and tell them we are trying to sensitize young people about sexual reproductive health what do you think needs to be done so there's that aspect but then about the curriculum I think even if we introduce it in the curriculum more and more and more because it's there sex education is there it's taught somewhere in primary but there is need to improve it yes but then change the attitude of even the people who are doing it because you can't ask a teacher to go and teach about sexual reproductive health when he or she feels like it's an awkward thing to do so there is that need for us to change the attitude and then if that works then now we can try and beef up what is already there in the curriculum yes so if anyone wanted to join you guys in the campaign or be a part of maybe educating young people how can they can they be part of that yes so jeactivate we are opening up membership for organizations in the in the counties to join and be part of jeactivate but in this campaign we are biased in three counties so Kilifi, Narok and Humabi so if someone is in those counties they can contact us and when we come for these forums we are gladly ready to engage them and even see how we can partner together in tackling the issue of sexual reproductive health so our contacts jeactivate it's online jeactivate.org there's a media contact person there and there is an email they can reach out to us also on social media jeactivate on all the platforms and we are willing especially we like working with youth groups because groups are a little bit organized and it's easier to reach a bigger number so in phase one and phase two we were going and we were just inviting young people to come and talk to them but we felt that we were not reaching a good number of people because of that you've invited me today tomorrow again you'll invite a different person tomorrow you'll invite me it like that but when you go for a group if there are youth groups out there in those three counties feel free to talk to us would see how we work together to implement this project in the three counties okay are you planning to move to other counties once these counties you have seen like a drop in teenage pregnancies and all that stuff I would not say per se because one thing we want to see first is that we are through this issue of health and then you know we are gearing up to move into elections so maybe next would be focusing on leadership and governance but then if there are counties that there are issues and the young people feel like they would want to be addressed would be glad to go and offer platform for them to discuss these issues so yes we will expand and I think we've gone to to almost all the counties at least 39 is a good number to 47 and some of the counties that we didn't go maybe it was a challenge of say security there was a place where to go but there were issues but we were willing to go and reach out to young people in all these counties okay anything else you'd like to add on that? I think it's for the young people out there who are watching us that we need to be proactive especially to push for change in our communities and the evolution one of the objectives is that power is to brought closer to the people and so as young people in our counties what are we doing to push for change in these counties and so ask the young people out there and even those who are watching us and they are not young to push for change in the counties not only on issues of sexual reproductive health but even issues of leadership and governance because if we don't get it right with our leaders we are not able to do anything for our counties yes and our last thing is that politics affects all of us and so we should not share a way when you hear that this forum is going to discuss about your leader or it's going to discuss about issues in that county let's go out to these meetings and talk about these issues that way we would be able to see the change that we desire as young people in this country okay that's a good platform and thank you so much for making time to talk to us about that thank you Asante Sanna for this and Tuna Shkuru thank you we shall do a follow up to see how the campaign is doing sure we will be glad to come and tell you that we did this and this in these counties and even as we go to these counties we usually try and get media coverage and talk about the issues that have come up from the trainings so like if you go to Umabe and there is an issue we highlight it through the media mostly and also on social media even right now we are doing a poll around issues of sexual reproductive health it's a type form just young people to feel what they think about these issues and once we get this data we can even present it to their relevant bodies be it the national or the county governments okay so thank you so much Grayson Asante so um as you've heard from Grayson all we need is an attitude change so that you can make better the sexual reproductive health thank you so much for tuning into real talk but don't you go anywhere more of a circuit coming your way