As Uganda joins the rest of the country to mark the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence, Lillibet Namakula, the team leader and co-founder of Public Health Ambassadors Uganda (PHAU) has called upon stakeholders to always give girls space to utter their grievances.
Namakula says that girls have a voice and what is only lacking is the spaces where they speak out.
“These girls know the problems they are facing that’s why we all need to do our best so that we give them enough space to out their challenges,” she said
PHAU is an NGO that evolved from a Music, Dance, and Drama club at Clarke International University (CIU) into a fully-fledged youth-led and youth-serving entity.
Its major purpose for its establishment was to increase awareness, sensitization, and adoption of safe adolescent sexual and reproductive health behavior and practices through edutainment, informative, and performance arts
approaches such as plays, skits, poems, dance narratives, and flash mobs.
“PHAU brings on board a wealth of experience in working with young people and is currently working in a number of districts across the country supporting in-school and out-of-school SRHR programs for young people,” she said
“PHAU employs a mix of approaches that engage, involve and appeal to young people to access sexual and reproductive health information and increase demand and utilization to youth-friendly services,”
PHAU, she said also advocates for Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (ASRHR) through community development initiatives, youth empowerment, advocacy, and social entrepreneurship.
She made these remarks during an exclusive interview with DaParrot at the sidelines of PHAU’s 2nd edition of the Adolescent Girls’Voices Poetry and Storytelling Competition on Saturday last week.
“As PHAU, we are offering a platform to these young girls to express their challenges affecting them and their colleagues outside their, before even thinking about the big statistics, we wanted to hear from these teens on what is affecting them,” she said
“We understand that girls have the voice but they don’t have the vacuum to out them so it’s our role as PHAU who have that platform to help them to do so also they cannot reach relevant stakeholders so in a competition like these we use them to collect grievances which we use in our advocacy,” she said.
The major objective of this competition, she said is to address all forms of socio-economic inequalities among Ugandan adolescent girls and young women aged (10-21 years) by amplifying their voices and rights through a creative writing competition.
“We want to use edutainment and informative approach to offer young people platform where they can express their grievances and as well find solutions,” she said
