Impact

In 2009, we recruited, trained and supported 130 volunteer peer educators in 13 colleges of education and 95 schools, including the surrounding communities. This amounted to a direct programme outreach of 24,859  school pupils and 1,293 student teachers. Key activities included:

  • Training 15 young people on effective advocacy skills and organising 77 advocacy meetings with relevant Zambian line ministries, advocating for greater youth inclusion
  • Conducting 85 sexual and reproductive health capacity building workshops for young teachers
  • Delivering 387 community level events aimed at facilitating attitude change towards youth and youth inclusion among parents, teachers and community members
  • Delivering 7,352 sexual and reproductive health lessons and 3,160 life skill sessions to in-school students and trainee teachers.

Our youth-led School HIV/AIDS Education Programme underwent a full scale external evaluation in early 2009 conducted by Family Health International (FHI).

This yielded extremely positive and exciting conclusions. Evidence from this external evaluation showed a positive increase in sexual and reproductive health behaviour amongst pupils involved in the programme as compared with those in other (control group) schools, including:
  • 13% more pupils who had been sexually active choosing to abstain from sexual activity (63% in total, compared to 56% in control schools)
  • 17% more pupils who were sexually active choosing to be faithful to one partner (49% in total, compared to 42% in control schools

The evaluation also demonstrated that pupils involved in the programme became more aware of sexual and reproductive health services at local level (5.9% increase). 

In addition to the above impacts, the FHI evaluation also concluded that Restless Development’s intervention is highly cost effective compared to other sexual and reproductive health interventions with young people, with a total inclusive cost per beneficiary of US$20.61.

Kapyanga basic school is one of the School Health Education Programme schools. During the focus group discussion conducted in September 2009, the Community Clinic Officer highlighted notable successes from the clinics point of view:

“Two years before [Restless Development’s] intervention in the community, one of the most reported cases at the clinic was the issue of teenage pregnancies. The clinic reported an average of 10 pregnancies from the school every year, with in turn increased numbers of school drop-outs. Over the last 12 months we have seen the reduction of teenage pregnancies from 10 cases annually to 4. [Restless Development] has been one of the huge contributors to this development.“

 
  
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