Related Projects 2018

Building sustainable improvements in gender equality for youth through creative engagement in Uganda

Students applied to take part in one of the 10 day multi-arts workshops we ran in the holidays. Here breakfast and lunch were provided as many were undernourished, and buses took children to and from the workshop site. For four mornings we held all group workshops on SRH and gender issues and then the young people chose which of seven art forms they want to work with to communicate to their peers things that have engaged them.

We used an arts-based methodology as this sticks with young people and we have found enables them to open up more freely and less judgementally than conventional interview/questionnaires, etc, it also appeals to both emotion and intellect. In the camp young people worked with two out of a possible seven arts disciplines:

• traditional dance
• breakdance
• pop music
• poetry
• art/design
• theatre
• film

All taught by Ugandans except the film and several were taught by people who come from the city. This group has been built up over years and other projects and we have a core 6-person Ugandan facilitation team for the whole project.

The resource need is mostly people. This project partnered with Jinja City Council, working with 36 schools, looking issues of behaviours between male and female students and sharing information on sexual and reproductive health. It builds on a slew of grants I have had working in the city over the past 7 years. We made a play on the issue with a community arts group I established some years ago and take it into the schools with a linked workshop for 100 young people aged 12-18. We did need film and arts resources to undertake the work.

Evidence from previous related projects have shown notable decreases in teenage pregnancy and increases in both school attendance and academic success. Teachers reported greatly improved  relationships between male and female students. Students spoke of increased self-confidence and the usefulness of all the SRH information. A number of young people have either gone into or are planning to go into creative careers. This is particularly significant as schools teach very little arts and artistic careers are often frowned upon by parents.

The outcomes from a raft of related projects have shown massive changes of perspective on arts and gender matters and huge increases in confidence. Also in a context where there is much misinformation about SRH sharing good information has been very important.