News Inclusion in SRHR health service
The “We Care” project has contributed to strengthening a more inclusive SRHR health service in Bangladesh. Vulnerable young people, people with disabilities and young people from minority groups can now also turn to SRHR health services with their questions. This has improved the quality of SRHR services within the local government as well as in villages and schools.
Since the start of the project in 2019, the We Care project worked towards improving Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) information and inclusive health services. To achieve this, the We Care team designed different curricula with corresponding tools, such as animation videos, handbooks for participants, PowerPoint presentations, videos, an activity package for use in classrooms and pictograms.
Roll-out of these interactive curricula throughout Bangladesh
Since March 2023 these curricula have become integrated into the government training system for these cadres. Moreover, We Care has also developed interactive sexual and reproductive health activities that the SACMOs conduct in schools for classes 6 – 10 as part of school education programmes. These interactive activities help to make the existing lecture-based curriculum more effective, as the sessions now also focus on building skills and internalising the knowledge of these students instead of only on knowledge transfer.
To successfully roll out the curricula, We Care trained 167 master trainers on the use of the interactive approaches and to provide mentoring and coaching support to each other when doing so.
We are very pleased that in March 2023, following this, the first batch of 240 FWVs and 400 FWAs were trained based on these curricula by the master trainers. NIPORT will train another 700 FWVs and 1000 FWAs spread over the entire country between 2023 and 2024.
In addition, NIPORT will train 50 supervisors based on the interactive and inclusive supervisory curriculum in the coming year. And, the SACMOs implemented 120 interactive sessions, between March and June 2023, on the basis of the We Care activities in schools and will continue doing so in the years to come.
Succesfully completed
By providing training sessions, evaluating SRHR curricula and continuous dissemination of knowledge, the people of Bangladesh have received better access to SRHR facilities and have more respect for SRHR. The project has now been successfully completed and the training materials have been integrated in the Bangladeshi government system. Bangladesh is slowly but surely evolving toward more inclusive and respectful SRHR healthcare.
Educational process
For Niketan it was educational to be in a consortium with KIT, Rutgers and government institutes of Bangladesh. With our specific expertise, we ensured that the needs of people with disabilities were consistently included in the development of curricula up to and including the actual provision of training to the target groups. We are proud to have been a small part of this consortium and that our efforts will make SRHR healthcare in Bangladesh more inclusive.
The We Care project was a NUFFIC project and was carried out by the KIT, Rutgers, RedOrange, Niketan, NIPORT and DGFP consortium in Bangladesh.
