Theirworld Partnership Supports Teacher-Training Pilot
Nairobi, Kenya - April 24th, 2023
ZanaAfrica is proud to partner with Theirworld, a leading global children’s charity based in the UK, to help support the adaptation of our Nia Program among public school teachers. This pilot program will support 50 teachers to be trained on ZanaAfrica’s proven intervention of reproductive health and life skills education, social and behavior change communications among adolescent girls and boys.
This pilot alone will impact more than 10,000 adolescent girls in schools in Kenya, supporting them with critical health and life skills education and sanitary kits including pads and underpants, helping our beneficiaries to manage their bodies with dignity.
This work is crucial and timely, and furthers Theirworld’s mission to “...ending the global education crisis and unleashing the potential of the next generation.” Two out of three girls across Kenya currently lack access to health education and sanitary pads. And in 2022, 15% of adolescent girls aged 15-19 in Kenya in 2022 were pregnant or had experienced a pregnancy (source).
With Theirworld’s support, the teacher-training pilot program will deliver ZanaAfrica’s health and life skills education to Kenyan adolescents through a rights-based approach. This rigorous and innovative training supports teachers by providing them with tablets, data, and the airtime needed to access ZanaAfrica’s training modules.
Before the teacher-training, ZanaAfrica had trained and supported community mentors to deliver its Nia programme through after-school clubs. Nia means “purpose” in the Kiswahili language. One of them is mother-of-three Alice Kombo, who has an adolescent daughter herself.
She said: “I grabbed the opportunity to be a mentor because I grew up in the same community I’m working in.
“Girls and boys said they were able to overcome challenges like dropping out of school, early pregnancies and child labour because they had the information. They knew what their goals were and they wanted to achieve them.
“Most of the girls were able to go to secondary school. For those who got pregnant, they were also able to come back to school and continue the journey of learning.”
These are the same outcomes we hope to see through our teacher-based program delivery. This pilot will help ZanaAfrica to gain crucial learning and feedback on the teacher- training, and allow us to iron out any challenges before moving to a wider scale across public schools. The next step in this program? Train 1,000 teachers across rural and urban Kenya, with more than 200,000 adolescents impacted and receiving the benefits of the program.
“Thanks to Theirworld’s generosity, we will gain valuable data on our path to scale, while widening our circle of impact, helping more girls to safely and confidently navigate puberty and step into the promise of their futures,” said ZanaAfrica Foundation’s Executive Director Alison Nakamura Netter.
