Sustainable Sex Education Project Targets Orphaned Youth
Irina Mashtal and her colleagues had worked a great deal on reproductive health education for the young people in Kharkiv, Ukraine when they began to recognize that the specific needs of one group of youth remained unmet. They noticed that many children growing up in orphanages faced challenges beyond the normal trials of entering adolescence, and decided to use their expertise to address the root cause of these difficulties. When the Kharkiv Oblast Health Department decided to place a special emphasis on providing comprehensive sexuality education for orphaned youth as part of the Oblast’s reproductive health strategy, Mashtal saw an opportunity to combine forces. Rainbow of Life, a non-governmental organization (NGO) was formed with the mission of ensuring that youth living in orphanages receive comprehensive, appropriate sexual health education.
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Rainbow of Life developed interactive training sessions which incorporate role play, drawing, and games to generate discussion about love, relationships, sexuality, pregnancy, and HIV/AIDS among orphaned teens.
Photo Credit: Lidiya Hryva |
The NGO developed a curriculum based on USAID’s Together for Health project materials on teaching family planning, relationships, and decision-making, and they used their own experience working in orphanages to tailor the information to their audience. Special emphasis was placed on topics pertaining to communication skills, building successful relationships, and accomplishing goals. Olexander Polyansky, one of the Rainbow of Life educators explains, “Many young people living in orphanages have difficulty understanding decision-making in relationships and family planning, because they have very different concepts of what [constitutes] a family.”
Sessions began in May 2007, after Rainbow of Life received a grant from USAID’s Together for Health project. The NGO taught in teams at special summer camps for orphans, conducting six workshops with over 120 young people. Mashtal describes the two eight-hour sessions with co-ed groups of varying ages as interactive, and role play, drawing and games, were used to explore issues including love, friendship, health, communication, sexuality, contraception, pregnancy and HIV/AIDS. Polyansky explains that the NGO team treated the young people as independent, responsible adults, and the youth responded readily, seizing the opportunity to express their own ideas about issues important to them.
As the team continued to work, they realized that they were only scratching the surface of the issue. There are over 6,000 young people living in orphanages in Kharkiv Oblast, and in spite of all of their hard work, simple logistics prevented them from reaching them all. The best way to reach more young people, the team realized, would be to train teachers at orphanages to teach sexuality education themselves. Recognizing that many teachers had difficulty addressing the special emotional and psychological needs of orphans, Mashtal set about drafting a curriculum to instruct teachers on how to counsel orphaned youth on issues of health and family planning. Thus far, Rainbow of Life has conducted three three-day trainings and has worked with over 100 teachers since May 2007. The hope is that such trainings will make the NGOs efforts more sustainable through dissemination of expertise to the individuals who can make a difference on an ongoing basis.
Kharkiv Oblast has one of the largest populations of orphaned youth in Ukraine, and the Oblast government is concerned about education in orphanages. Rainbow of Life’s project is especially impressive because it not only addresses these issues directly, but it ensures the continuation of this work so that the Oblast can make real progress towards bettering the lives of orphaned youth. The long-view perspective and sustainability of this project can serve as a helpful model to NGOs in other oblasts as they work to effect change in their communities.
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