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In Uganda, young people are creating podcasts and videos to show the reality of their sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and affect change on gender justice.
“As an organisation we’re taking different approach,” says Lynn Akullu Tasha, Communications and Advocacy Officer at Reach a Hand Uganda (RAHU), part of the Generation G partnership and behind the initiative. “We’re doing advocacy in different way, in a way that is touching people’s emotions, their beliefs and values. When a girl has an early marriage, if you’re able to watch that girl’s journey, it can touch you as a parent or as a cultural or religious leader, and you can learn from that.”
Reaching young people in rural areas
The media content that young people are making comes through the Sauti Plus Media Hub. This is RAHU’s communications arm, which was established as part of its 2022-2026 strategic plan to adopt a social behaviour change approach focusing on SRHR ‘edutainment’, targeted at urban youths through online and offline platforms. In 2023, with funding from the Generation G Innovation Fund, peer educators (ages 17-24) and other RAHU staff conducted research on how to use the media hub to reach young people in rural areas.
The process involved 180 participants, including young farmers and teenager parents, as well as influential figures like local leaders and SRH providers. From this, the idea of developing ‘fireside chat’ videos was born. Young people were trained on utilising available resources to capture young people’s stories in rural communities. In the videos, peer educators record themselves sitting with young people around a fire, discussing a subject of interest to them, such as mental health, careers, healthy relationships, consent or menstruation. The recording is then edited by young people who have been trained on media production skills and shared to peer educators to air on their mobile phones in ‘listening clubs’, which young people attend. So far, 28 listening clubs have been established, including in rural parts of Adjumani and Mbarara districts, as well as in some cities like Kampala.
“Long ago, elders would talk to young people around burning fires, so the fireside chat idea resonated with young people in rural districts,” explains Lynn. “When other young people [in different areas] listen to this recording, it helps start conversations.”
Content made by young people for young people
As part of the project, the media hub is also making stand-alone podcasts featuring young people’s real-life SRHR stories alongside interviews with celebrities that young people admire (Miss Uganda and singer Eddy Kenzo have both appeared, for example), plus SRHR organisations and partners. The podcasts are available online through the media hub, and distributed through listening clubs.
Makku Hassan, 24, is a RAHU peer educator and communications associate who produces content for the media hub. He says: “Most of the people [making the content] are peer educators who have been trained and empowered with knowledge to identify, discuss and address SRHR issues faced by young people in their communities, so they know how to interview people in relation to SRHR. When we speak with young people living with HIV or facing challenges like gender-based violence, they can easily speak out – it’s not like speaking to a normal news reporter. We’ve got people heating up our inbox, talking about their own stories because they know we’re not going to judge.”
Hassan has seen the difference the podcasts and other Sauti content can make to young people. He recalls how an influencer who spoke in a podcast about being sexually abused has helped other young people understand “not to keep quiet when things are going off track”, and even resulted in a teenage girl reporting abuse after hearing the influencer’s story at a school talk.
“Knowing that every time I’m holding up the camera or microphone, I'm changing lives in my country, that motivates me”
He adds: “I was raised by an aunt and I’ve seen how women are undermined a lot …By talking to girls, engaging them with our content and giving them information, some of them get this confidence to feel like, ‘fine, I gave birth or I married young, but that shouldn’t be it’.”
The ripple effect
The media hub also broadcasts community events and dialogues so young people in different parts of the country can watch their peers speak up about their sexual and reproductive rights and hold leaders accountable. The hub partners with local TV and radio stations to ensure these events get covered in local languages and to helps raise young people’s issues with wider audiences, including national and regional policy-makers
Live streaming and local media coverage of the Youth Summit in Adjumani in August 2023, which showed young people speaking about sexual violence, resulted in the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Health visiting the area to discuss teenage pregnancy rates. Similarly, live streaming of an intergenerational dialogue in the remote Tooro region, in which a 15-year-girl described how teenage girls there are exchanging sex for menstrual pads, led the Regional Health Minister to engage with RAHU to find ways to reduce or eliminate such costs.
“By broadcasting something like that we are definitely looking at the ripple effect because the challenges of menstrual products is just not happening there, it’s something that is cutting across the country,” says Lynn.
Changing mindsets
Lynn says media hub content is also helping to change mindsets among some of the “gatekeepers” of young people, such as parents, teachers, religious and cultural leaders. These changes come about both as a result of adults reacting to young people’s personal stories and agreeing to participate in media hub interviews.
Lynn adds: “I remember an engagement in a Muslim area where we played a scene from our Kyaddala TV series about a girl who was being forced into marriage, and the religious leaders were all very touched. People just being willing to engage in this kind of conversation is a big win for us.
We know that this kind of advocacy work takes time, but the change that we’re looking for in this kind of work starts with a change in mindset.”
