As part of efforts to shift norms and raise individual and community awareness, TikVah’s Adolescent and Youth for Awareness, Agency, Advocacy, and Accountability (AW4A) project in partnership with the faith and local communities are undertaking trainings and
stigma reduction workshops to address attitudes and/or misconceptions around gender and
Sexuality. This includes using activities like body mapping to identify individual sources
of pride, shame, pleasure, or pain, and using these kinds of activities as an entry point to
facilitate conversations about integral SRHR issues and how faith and beliefs can be used
to empower, liberate and enhance reproductive justice.

The initiative aims to achieve a more effective youth-led, coordinated response to support adolescent and young people’s SRHR needs within faith communities. Youths are empowered to spearhead actions on SRHR as they interact with faith leaders in their faith organizations and communities. With this project, the intention is to contribute to turning congregations into safe and healing spaces for adolescent and young people and ensuring that faith leaders / institutions are responsive and open to the SRHR needs of young people. Our efforts to advance the advocacy agenda on SRHR in Siaya are triggered by the current challenges faced by adolescent and youths to access sexual reproductive health services — including family planning services—the gaps in accessing Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) that would enable especially adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) to acquire body autonomy and make informed decisions, the current trends in defilement of the girl child in Siaya,  teenage pregnancies. Moreover, it is informed by Gender-Based Violence and the extremist, stigmatizing and exclusive messaging by the faith community that contribute to and influence decision and choices among youths to the detriment of their health. Further, we recognize that campaigns on SRHR need to move beyond messages which seek to change individual behavior by providing merely individual solutions while sideling deep-seated structural gender inequalities which are inspired by culture and irrigated by religion. This is an innovation platform for adolescent and youths to debate the issues affecting them including SRHR matters, document information and emerging issues such as access to FP commodities, GBV cases, and Teenage Pregnancy cases and use the information and data to engage with faith community and duty bearers to influence programs that contribute to the change they desire

As a Faith Based Organization, we contend that faith communities do not have to abandon their doctrines (where tensions exist) to contribute to more positive health and mental health outcomes for young individuals. We promote family harmony and interpersonal kindness. Through both religion and medicine, we seek to alleviate pain and address difficult aspects of marginalized youths’ lives to enhance physical, social, emotional, and spiritual well-being. This program engages both the marginalized youths, faith leaders, community members and services providers to facilitate dialogue, inclusion, and a welcoming spirit. Faith communities are encouraged to collaborate with health care providers to stimulate and enhance these conversations and work toward the aspiration of enhanced human flourishing.

In keeping with the intersectionalised framework which informs the project’s approach, minority youth’s participation are central in the community study. They are facilitated to speak for themselves and lead the process of identifying and planning suitable intervention actions towards enabling their access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information and services. A recognition that all people in their diversity have a right to embrace, express, and celebrate their dignity, including sexual well-being, guides the community study. Directed by enablers of intersectionality, the community study questions are designed to make visible multiple factors and experiences which overlap and combine to shape an individual’s identity. Ways that these identities and experiences determine privilege and/or discrimination at different times are analyzed as applicable. An action plan to bring to the attention of duty bearers actions that need to be taken to address the issues that have been raised and analysed, conclude the community study.

The Community Study  is used to facilitate inclusion of all people in their diversity, in the processes of analysing SRHR issues and exploring actions that need to be implementing so that everyone can access all rounded sexual wellness.

• It is a community study in which everyone is welcome to participate and make contributions in the pursuit of action(s) that will facilitate all people in their diversity to access their SRHR.
• In the community study, all voices are listened to, valued, and considered towards developing an action plan that will address the issues raised.
• The diversity of participants, while prioritizing youth, caters to inclusion of varying and diverse SRHR needs and concerns as voiced by participants so that the action plan leaves no one behind.
• It facilitates action-oriented discussions on numerous SRHR topics which entail dialogue between the context of the religious text and the contemporary context of the community.
• This tool invites people to a time of celebration as progress is made towards realising the desired change – that all people in their diversity can access their SRHR.

The Community Study tool is derived from the Contextual Bible Study (CBS) model. The Ujamaa Centre was started in 1985 to facilitate good governance and development in faith-based institutions and the civil society. The primary concern of the Ujamaa centre is to address oppressive structures which trap and keep people oppressed and marginalized. Through this project we have established community study in schools, local community and in churches.