Andrew
Fatima Bulla-Musakwa
THE United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) last week launched an educational toolkit to help schools address Sexual Reproductive and Gender-Based Violence (SRGBV).
The curriculum-based toolkit seeks to help arrest violence in schools.
Studies have shown that one in three learners experience bullying in schools around the globe, while a 2019 UNESCO report revealed that 48 percent of learners in eastern and southern African schools experience bullying.
The toolkit, titled: “Connect with Respect (CwR)”, was designed to assist teachers to deliver educational programmes in upper primary and early secondary schools.
It focuses on age-appropriate learning activities through concepts and themes relating to the prevention of GBV, while promoting respectful relationships.
Over 9 000 pupils and more than 300 teachers from five countries, including Zambia, Tanzania and Eswatini, participated in the pilot project.
Zimbabwe pulled out midway, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Launched a day after the world marked International Women’s Day (IWD), the toolkit provides teachers with a series of guidance notes and school leadership concepts related to preventing SRGBV.
This year’s IWD commemorations ran under the theme #BreakTheBias.
The toolkit goes further by providing a structured programme for teachers working with learners in early secondary school that includes detailed instructions for delivering activities in seven topics.
The topics comprise understanding gender and gender equality; raising awareness about GBV, and developing skills for respectful relationships among others.
The learning activities are suitable for use in a range of subjects, including the school’s literacy development programme, social studies, pastoral care, life skills, civic education, health and sexuality education.
Speaking during the virtual launch, lead author of the toolkit, Professor Helen Cahill, said the CwR also focuses on gender stereotypes.
“Students take this focus before they move to a focus on understanding all the different ways that GBV can be perpetrated. They then develop their skills to respond and provide positive peer support through respectful relationships and also focus on how to refrain from joining in these forms of violence,” she said.
Some of the outcomes of the project included an endorsement by 91 percent of the pupils that all schools should teach about the prevention of GBV.
Up to 77 percent of the pupils also reported that doing CwR lessons improved their relationship skills.
“Responding to a question about how useful the CwR programme activities were, most pupils identified the programme as either useful, very useful or extremely useful,” reads the project’s report.
It concluded that the programme led to a reduction in the occurrence of verbal sexual harassment by boys targeting girls.
In addition, the project also concluded that there was a reduction in learners reporting pupils of the same or opposite gender and increased knowledge about how to seek help when affected by GBV.
Female Students Network Trust executive director, Ms Evernice Munando, said the initiative will help reshape society’s mindset and reform existing stereotyping structures.
“Rolling out a toolkit targeting secondary and primary level learners is really of great advantage,” she said.
“This is because SRGBV begins at a tender age and from our experience as Female Students Network Trust, when we are at tertiary level, we have realised that the girl child would have already been affected by these anomalies that happen in our societies.”
Ms Munando said the toolkit will help churn out knowledgeable pupils and curb vices such as child marriages.
“By engaging children in a curriculum that will enlighten them in some of these aspects, we will equip them in terms of the response mechanism that they have in the context of SRGBV,” she said.
However, the study also found that the already congested school curriculum could make it difficult to incorporate additional subjects.
The director of Katswe Sistahood, Mrs Talent Jumo, said:
“Young people spend a huge percentage of their time in school, and a well-structured curriculum on building life skills, effective communication, and relationships will go a long way in ensuring that adolescents have a strong support system to help them navigate through life safely.”
The types of SRGBV experienced at school include name-calling, use of gendered language, gossiping, unwanted kissing or groping and sexual remarks about another’s behaviour among many others.
Online Reporter