This is the bulk of our project, yet it’s really hard to assess the sort of impact we are having.

As a team, we teach 19 lessons a week across four different schools.

These four schools differ greatly and so our lesson plans and teaching techniques have had to adapt accordingly.

One school is a girls’ boarding school. The girls have a very good standard of English, are very keen participators and come from all over the country, not just this community. Meanwhile another is a Private School. This doesn’t have the same connotations as it does in the UK. Rather, it is a school which anyone can attend as long as they pay the fee (45,000 Kwacha a term, about £40), should they wish to retake to get in to college for example. This means there are students of very differing ages in a class, some of the students in a form of what should be 14/15 years olds seem around 20 years old at least. The rules also feel somewhat more lax here, on wearing the right uniform for example, and discipline in the class can be a bit of a struggle. The other two schools are government schools, one with a boarding option.

We work with an organisation who are based in the region’s capital, but this is their first venture into our community, so the program is new for all our schools and students. The organisation provided us with a scripted manual which was approved by the Ministry for Education as well as three experienced peer educators who join us in our groups in schools each week.

As a team we have/had our critiques of the manual, partner organisation and teaching content, but at the same time, needed to cooperate with the organisation in order to even be in schools. The Ministry of Education have strict rules on what can and cannot be taught. We cannot, for example, bring a condom into the classroom. While this is frustrating, as the students would genuinely benefit from this knowledge and the majority of students do not know how to use them, we have had to stick within these frameworks to be able to continue our work at all, and just have to become creative in the way we convey messages.

Other concerns we first had have been somewhat overcome by deeper cultural understanding. When we first began rehearsing with the manual, we were concerned it was not age appropriate and was too patronising. However, with the exception of the school with the older students, we have discovered the students here are on the whole less informed and exposed to sex than their counterparts of the same age in the UK. The manual works a lot better than we first gave it credit for.

(In fact, even the oldest looking student in my class told me that if a teenage boy sleeps with an older woman, he cannot impregnate her because “his sperm is not yet mature and cannot swim fast enough”.)

To give you an idea about the manual’s content, one section includes role playing how to say “No” to pressure to get sexual in a relationship. While I don’t want this to be the only message we are teaching and I have persistently tried to balance out such messages of abstinence with information about contraception, I do find it quite a powerful thing to encourage young people to practice. It’s an activity I think would be equally valuable for young people in the UK. Things like the fact you don’t have to justify your reasons for not wanting to do something, and you should be able to communicate how the pressure makes you feel to the other person. Of course, we do also emphasise repeatedly that one should never exert pressure in a relationship in the first place.

I think what I find the most challenging aspect of this work is that even if we do get the class quiet enough, communicate our message interestingly enough, get them to recite contraceptives and STI symptoms and so on and so forth, we simply cannot know if this knowledge is really going to inform their behavioural practices.

We collected baseline data by conducting surveys with a random sample of students from each of our classes. While most teenagers I spoke with were sexually inexperienced, one boy recited most of the knowledge perfectly, yet had had two sexual partners in the past year and had never used a condom. On top of that, I spoke with a nurse who, trained in delivering sexual health knowledge, herself only subscribes to natural contraception methods and claims she has seen many negative health effects from condoms doing damage to the cervix.

If the wider community’s attitudes are fixed one way, and this includes the service providers our students can access Family Planning from, then surely we are swimming against the tide here (tide of sperm?).

Over the next couple of weeks we will be carrying out Focus Group discussions with parents, and that should be really interesting for comparing the attitudes surrounding sexual health of parents with their children’s.

The schools have also been open and welcoming, mostly saying we are fine to discuss contraception and giving us the space to teach however we like.

If anyone reading this has any questions about how we tackle anything – or (please!) suggestions or experience they can offer, please please get in touch. The reality is we are volunteers, untrained in reproductive health, trying to inform and empower young girls and boys about their sexual health and enjoyment, in a country where homosexuality and abortion are both illegal and roughly 1 in 9 people are living with HIV/AIDs. There are so many challenges about this I could have covered here and I will try and get into more depth at the next opportunity, or following any questions.

In the meantime, while I typed this blog I have had three three-year olds banging at my door and running into my room and am nearly hoarse from screaming “LAKA” (Stop!) and “YAYI” (No!) at them, so I’d now better go, de-stress and be nice to them.