Wame Gori integrates IT in youth health care services
Wame Gori, a youth officer at the Botswana Family Welfare Association (BOFWA) talks to SunHealth about helping young people aged between 10-24 years with a whole range of issues from behavioural difficulties to teenage pregnancy. What does your work at BOFWA entail? Capacitating young people in Youth Centred Approach model Empowering young people on leadership and governance skills in the SRHR field Assisting young people to plan and implement annual youth plans in accordance with Organisational Strategy. Discuss the overall services BOFWA provides? The services at BOFWA are categorised into three strategic pillars which are; Advocacy Services: The organisation has projects that advocate for the key populations, which are men having sex with men (MSM) and Female sex workers. The advocacy wing also looks into the lives of adolescents and young peoples including underserved and marginalised populations. Education Services: BOFWA provides Comprehensive Sexuality Education to adolescents and young people who are out of school and also equip them with life skills and workplace wellness Clinical service provision: The clinical services that are provided are done in three service points being static (BOFWA clinics), outreach (reaching out to the community) and drop in centres (safe spaces). The services provided are; HIV Testing Services ARV services - Provision of ARV drugs to the HIV positive clients and continues monitoring their CD4 counts and viral loads and other general tests. Both the positive and negative clients are then linked to care either to nurses or to doctors. Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) screening and treatment- BOFWA provides screening and treatment of most of the STIs Screening of cancers of the reproductive health – Pap smear, VIA, and cancer of the prostate gland Obstetrics Family Planning Services: Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives (LARCs) and Short Acting Reversible Contraceptives (SARCs) which are Implants, IUCD, injectable, pills, condoms Psychosocial support: BOFWA provides psychosocial support to its targeted population in all areas of life not only SRHR and relationships. What is your normal day at work like? Working with young people is interesting, mainly because there is nothing for them without them, every decision making and any plan or activity that I may think of, I have to request for their input. Again there is competition with other NGOs , thus there is need to focus and produce competing initiatives and have a calendar of events at the top of your head for better response with country youth programmes. What would you change about your profession, given a chance? I recently went on a big change in my profession. I was a regular IT person, but now, the combination of technology and young people is amazing. I had shifted from only focusing in hardware/software, networking, databases and web development to making technology add value to BOFWA. Aligning it to their strategy, all they need is to reach more young people with ASRH information by any means and technology is the way What are some of the challenges you have had to tackle in life/in your job? Working for an NGO on its own is a challenge; you multitask, as I had to transition from the world of IT to that of youth empowerment and have time for them both, the only thing is not to concentrate on the difficulty of the work, instead on its results and rewards, else you will be discouraged. By entering the NGO life you don’t ask yourself what the organisation can do or has for you, but what you can do or have for the organisation. What do you love about your work? It’s not about profession, but patience and passion and determination. Growth and love for reading and research will automatically expand. Putting yourself into the lives of young people becomes involuntary. Love for people, caring for them, guiding them and being more concerned about making them feel good about themselves than making them feel good about you; and acceptance of every human being regardless of their sexual orientation is what I like about my work. What’s you take on unsafe abortion in Botswana? How prevalent is the problem and what can be done to fix it? I am aware that Unsafe Abortion contributes 15% of the total maternal deaths in Botswana, and I acknowledge that unsafe abortion requires intense programming to reduce the incidence of abortion-related deaths. Sexual and reproductive health including HIV is a key adolescent health area. What are your thoughts and your experiences as you work with young people? Working with young people has proven to me that they lack knowledge in various key SRHR areas. For example HIV knowledge levels in adolescents is 48.3% and this can only be managed by using the Youth Centred Approach in SRHR Programming Empowering those young people helps develop their negotiation skills and decision making. They will start to open up and start sharing SRHR issues on their social media to inform their peers. How do you think we can effectively prevent a vast majority of adolescent pregnancies and HIV infections? Upscale uptake of Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) for adolescents and young people, this will increase access to contraceptives. BOFWA is one of the NGOs that have service providers that are forever youthful at heart, who are trained in Comprehensive sexuality education, attitude transformation and values clarifications; and who can communicate well with adolescents to lay the foundation for them and to make them feel free and accepted the way they are. If young people are made free by communicating and educating them on CSE issues, and if their parents can accept the reality that their adolescents need that communicator who will educate them from a different angle, not the classroom setting- then I see a decline in pregnancies and new infections. What are your thoughts on PrEP being made available for young people to prevent HIV transmission? Prep requires intensive knowledge building in adolescents and young people to prevent myths and misconceptions that will lead to a rapid growth in new HIV incidences