Episode 13: Agency building for Girls with Monica Nyiraguhabua

The curriculum that you're using, is this government curriculum? And if it's not, then I'll ask another question.

Like, is it the Ministry of Education curriculum? The lessons that you are covering out in the school calendar, is that part of the curriculum? aspirations of the Ministry of Health that life skills or adolescent education should be incorporated? Or is it something that you are trying to work into that public school system?

So when we started, just like any other organization started, we appreciated the PRC model.

The PRC model was a model developed by USID then that was working with primary schools around life skills education.

Right.

And of course, this was a model that was like scaled throughout the country.

Right.

But five years after that grant ended, that curriculum was shelved.

Okay.

So we did not start from zero.

We appreciated that model.

And so we built off that model and then began to appreciate what are the actual issues of the girls in this day-to-day realities.

So our model... started that way but it has been rebuilt and reinforced based on the needs based on the issues we are seeing so that again we do not have a curriculum that is just a book curriculum and nothing to do with the realities of the children that we are serving currently yeah so the topics could be the same for example topics around communication self-esteem um

Sexual

reproductive health.

But what changes is the kind of questions that you're asking the children to be able to explore.

What changes is the methodology.

So using a lot of play-based activities to help ignite conversations, help ignite dialogue is what we are doing differently.

Because we also appreciate that children learn so much through play.

Using soccer as a hook, talk about gender and power.

So the topics could be the same, but we've learned that how do you bring play? How do you bring dialogues, conversations that a child of head knows exactly what this program is about?

Wonderful.

I'll be coming back to the question of delivery and incorporation into public systems because as you think about scale and doing this, by the way, what is the reach like? How many kids, how many schools is this being delivered as we speak right now?

So this year we are delivering to 6,700 children in 45 communities across the central and eastern Uganda.

So imagine a situation where you want this to be the norm across Uganda.