Integrating community advocacy to national platforms
My name is Nsubuga Ronald, I am a TeamUp Uganda Youth Champion trained by A4HU in leadership, governance, monitoring, and SRH advocacy both within my community in Bbanda Sub County, Mityana district and nationally. I am also a TeamUp Uganda Peer Facilitator trained to work peer to peer to ensure that young people receive the right information on SRH and are informed of the available youth friendly services that TeamUp Uganda and partners A4HU, HRNS, Whave Solutions, Siemens, DSW and BMZ_bund are working to bring closer to them.
Working under TeamUp Uganda has enhanced my abilities to seek and live a healthy and productive life while using the training and capacity built my peers and me under the TeamUp Uganda program to amplify our livelihoods and the country’s economy.
I have received training under the HRNS Youth Farmer Field School methodology to turn myself into a commercial farmer engaging in agriculture as a business and using the right agricultural practices used on our demonstration plots to increase yield and quality of products. My gardens have improved greatly and now my peers are looking on not only with admiration but also in an inspired way and are asking me how they can join me and improve their livelihoods. Seeing my peers and I engaging under TeamUp Uganda in productive has changed the attitude of many more young people towards agriculture.
Just yesterday, I attended the RMNCAH youth E summit in Kampala. This provide me with the opportunity to engage with Youth from different parts of the country and multiple decision makers in attendance, The summit was televised on the national television in Uganda, meaning that the message we were there to convey was heard by a great more people than we could ever have hoped of engaging with in our dreams.
At the RMNCAH Youth E summit, we discussed many issues that young people face today, and possible solutions that could mitigate these issues. We hope that the decision makers and policy makers in attendance will listen and put into effect all discussed.
We also made connections with other youth at the E summit, I remember meeting a member of the Mission Youth Club who were responsible for providing masks to us in Mityana. I know that it is through these linkages formed with youth from across the country that we can make lasting changes in our thinking and create conversations that improve service delivery to young people especially in economic empowerment, SRH and access to water.
Going back to Mityana, I will ensure to also keep track of how our leaders are tackling the many issues young people are facing, at the moment the most crucial are teenage pregnancy, decreased livelihood due to the effects of covid19 and the lack of SRH commodities in the health centers in the community.
One of the things, we are working actively on as well as ensuring referrals of young people to health centers, many young people are often at risk of pregnancy, STI infections and the contraction of HIV because they are too shy to approach health centers. We are working to first of all inform them about the services available to them, removing the stigma associated with using SRH service and ensuring that when they do visit the health centers they receive the help they need.
