23 Jul 2017

Bana Ba Letsatsi recently hosted a two-day camp for GEM club leaders from Maun area to empower young girls with information on sexual reproductive health rights.

GEM, which stands for Girls Empowerment Meeting is a global girls empowerment programme established under Bana Ba Letsatsi last year September. 

Head of Adolescent, Sexual Reproductive Health (ASRH) at Bana Ba Letsatsi, Ms Goabaone Motsatsing said in an interview that they started the programme with 10 schools around Maun with the aim of empowering girls to be aware of the SRH rights, to be assertive in making decisions that concerned their SRH as well as help curb high prevalence of teenage pregnancy. 

The GEM camp held in Kasane had 25 participants with two representatives from each school.

“We picked girls who were displaying a lot of promise and leadership from each school as a way of rewarding them through this camp,” Ms Motsatsing said.

 The expectation is that the girls will reciprocate the information shared with them with their peers.

“We also use the GEM platform as a space for the girls to open up and raise their concerns without fear,” she added.

She highlighted that one of the biggest challenges was lack of communication that existed between parents and children regarding issues of SRH, which are a taboo conversations in Setswana culture.

 To address this, Ms Motsatsing said GEM had in the past given the girls assignments that required them to have a conversation about SRH with their parents and submit the feedback to class. 

“The responses varied from ‘I could not bring myself to initiate that conversation with my parents’ to ‘I finally did it’,” she explained.

In their presentations, the girls also alluded that the root cause of teenage pregnancy was that their parents were failing to engage them in issues pertaining to sex and therefore left them to explore these on their own albeit with painful consequences. 

One of the participants, form three student,  Sygney Gabatshwane commended the camp for instilling life skills she would need in her life. “I have learnt to be assertive and to know that my No means No,” she said.

GEM was founded by Amplify Change in the United Kingdom under the project ‘Creating a healthy and empowered youth community project.’ ENDS