Breaking barriers in the prevention of adolescent pregnancies for in-school students in Kirehe district

Despite a variety of mainly school-driven prevention strategies, the number of adolescent pregnancies in Rwanda is worryingly high and is even expected to increase. School-based programs face the problem of discomfort and taboo with SRH in teachers and students. Consequently, students seek information with their peers, posing problems with the reliability of exchanged information. Second, peers are not always fully accessible to all adolescents. This project’s objective is to empower Kirehe secondary school students aged 15-19 years old in SRH. We aim to achieve this by strengthening the Midwifery and Nursing programs in SRH education (= first train-the-trainer module), so that these future health care workers are sufficiently equipped to train selected groups of students (= second train-the-trainer module) who in turn can connect to other students for accurate exchange in SRH knowledge and skills. Finally, this will contribute to 1) more independent and thoughtful decisions on contraception and sexual behaviour, and consequently less adolescent pregnancies, and 2) a reinforcement of the Rwandan education.