When a young girl gets pregnant in our communities, they don't have options. Usually a few, if
not none. More often that not, she drops out of school.
After dropping out of school, she is forced into a marriage. If not forced into a marriage,
then she brings up a kid as a single mother and is a teen mother, in this case.
Once out of school, then she cannot pursue her career chooses. Typically, this leads back to poverty.
So it simply perpetuates the cycle of poverty.
The Youth Peer Provider Program is a program model that was developed by Planned Parenthood
Global. This is a program where young people are trained and managed to provide sexual
and reproductive health information, as well as services, to their peers.
The benefit of a young person talking to a fellow young person in this case there's a
lot of acceptance because of the age bracket. They belong to the same age.
They understand one another in terms of language, and you see the Youth Peer Providers, they
also experience some of the same problems the young people undergo.
In our case here in Kenya, they have established the relationship in the fields as they play
football. All in schools, because they are in school together. All at the community level
where they are offering services.
The Youth Care Provider Program has really helped me as an individual because I got exposure,
I got to interact with many people. It builds my confidence.
Once you empower them, once you give them that information, through training, through
enabling access to information, through participation and enabling them to participate in what we are doing.
They change, and they do very well.
When you listen to their stories, you get amazed by how much information can change a person.
My fellow peers are very courageous people. Very reliable, very committed. We work as
a team hand in hand to help our fellow youth.
Our goal is that other organizations can see this as a program model that they can actually
adopt and implement so that the Youth Peer Provider Program will not be considered a
novelty, but will just be a normal part of youth having access to sexual reproductive health services.
The youth peer model has been described variously as lifesaving. Some think it's a fresh idea
in the communities that we work with. But most people do not respect the people and
the chooses that young people are making.
What I think is the vision for the future in terms of young people's access to sexual
and reproductive health services is first to have an environment where adults in particular
are supportive of young people, they understand that this is a normal part of human development.
Young people's access to sexual and reproductive health, information, and services will be
as important as young people's access to basic education.