Girl-led community change through co-created book on sex and rights
Girls write a book together about sex, health and rights to be distributed in public schools for community education.
Morrisline shows her power.
Tenneh, a community leader in West Point, travels to an MTM public school to get to know students and assess safety at the school.
Mercy leads conversation about her experience learning about sex from her parents, and then experiencing education about her reproductive health and rights as a student at More Then Me.
What specific problem(s) are you trying to address?
Sexual exploitation and teenage pregnancy are pervasive in Liberia. It is more likely for a 15 year old girl to be pregnant than it is for her to know how to read 1 sentence.
More Than Me started when Katie Meyler met an 11 year old girl named Abigail, who was giving oral sex for clean drinking water. She paid school fees for girls who were working on the streets, but realized that schools were often a place of further neglect. Sex for grades and other transactional sex is common in Liberia. After this realization, More Than Me opened a free all girls academy where girls have access to two meals per day, healthcare, and family planning. Our girls say that a main problem is misinformation about sex in their community.
What are some of your unanswered questions about the problem(s) you are working to address?
- How might we ensure girls know their rights and have access to treatment and education to avoid pregnancy and disease?
- How might we best educate adults in the community about sexual and reproductive health so that valid information is passed on to their children?
- How might we ensure our girls are safe from abuse, in schools and communities where men and boys are present?
- How might we change cultural norms around reporting and prosecuting rape?
Explain Your Idea
Tenneh Jackson Kaba, a Case Manager at More Than Me Academy, convened a group of students ages 13-18 to discuss their experience of understanding sex and their reproductive rights. These girls are among the most vulnerable living in West Point, the biggest slum in Liberia. Many of them had been involved in or exposed to sex work before becoming students at More Than Me. They have now had 1-5 years of access to counseling, healthcare, and education and have incredible ideas about what is needed and what helped them the most.
Our idea is to leverage the experience and knowledge of our young people to create public awareness and education around sexual and reproductive health to distribute to communities through our public school network. They are interested in writing a book that illustrates the myths and truths about sex, girl’s rights, and family planning.
The girls will help write and create guides for creating safe community spaces where boys, girls and adults can learn about these issues using the book as an educational tool. The book and guides will be distributed through our public schools - 19 this year and up to 100 in 2018. At each school a female community leader, similar to Tenneh, will be selected to lead health clubs and will receive training about health and reproductive issues.
This will be the education component of a larger partnership with government community health workers to ensure access to family planning drugs in the communities where we work.
Tenneh, a case manager at More Than Me Academy, gathered a group of girls together to discuss their experiences of learning about sex and reproductive health and asked their ideas about what is needed to make girls safer and more prepared. This is an excerpt of the questions and answers from the girls.
Name the three most important ways that your idea will address your identified problem(s).
1. Teach girls, boys, and communities about sexual and reproductive health
2. Empower girls and community women to lead education around sexual and reproductive health and act as role models to their peers and in their communities
3. By making girls and their communities aware of their rights, we will change cultural norms around reporting sexual abuse
How is your idea unique?
Our idea is unique because it emphasizes teaching entire communities about sexual and reproductive health. Most programs focus on girls only, and honestly we might have done that too, if we didn’t hear directly from girls how important it is to include boys and adults as well. Everyone in Liberia is suffering from a lack to adequate information.
This idea empowers girls to create culturally relevant and informative material and act as leaders in their country. While there are other awesome organizations working around girl’s health and empowerment, we believe materials created by girls will be the best way to reach their communities and elevate the role of women as leaders.
We are open to partnering with organizations on other parts of this work. While education is the focus of this challenge, we are partnering with government on health care delivery mechanisms, that will be more effective once communities know facts about family planning and sexual health.
What are some outstanding concerns or questions that you have regarding your idea?
- In a country where there is not a strong reading culture, is a book the best tool for delivering information? We might consider a radio show to have discussions on sexual and reproductive health instead or in conjunction with a book.
- What are the complementary government supports necessary to ensure girls can report sexual exploitation and rapists are tried?
- What are the best practices in sub-Saharan Africa around health education and health care delivery that we can adapt?
Who are your end users?
Girls and women in Liberia will benefit if this problem is addressed. Control over their own bodies leads to empowerment, increased education, increased lifetime earnings, healthier children and families, and reinvestment in their community.
Liberian communities are the end users of this intervention, since we are aiming to educate girls, boys, and adults. 19 communities will be immediately impacted through our school network this year, but as we expand our schools and codify our program we hope to reach 500 More Than Me Public Schools and to open source our program so that any school in Liberia can leverage it.
Women and girls will ultimately benefit the most if this problem is addressed.
Entire communities of women, men, girls, and boys are our end users. There is widespread misinformation surrounding sex and reproductive health that needs to be addressed community-wide.
Where will your idea be implemented?
What is the primary type of emergency setting where your innovation would operate?
Community at risk of disaster
Tell us more about the emergency setting that you intend to implement in
Liberia is one of the poorest countries in the world. After a 13 year Civil War, 80% of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed. In 2014 Ebola hit, exacerbating the issues of transportation, healthcare, education and making it glaringly apparent that Liberia would never be a safe and stable place, until systems were rebuilt.
More Than Me is part of a national effort to rebuild the education system and our model puts safety, health and education at the center of communities.
What is your organization's name?
More Than Me
Tell us more about you.
More Than Me runs a growing network of public schools in Liberia, using education as a catalyst for social change.
We work in partnership with the Ministry of Education in the first nationwide public-private school reform effort in the world.
This year we have 18 schools, with the goal of reaching 500 schools and 20% of children by 2021. Our (S)HE Matters model puts schools at the center of community and builds local capacity to ensure safety, health, education, and monitoring for all children.
MTM started with the belief that no little girls should have to work the streets when her biggest dream is to go to school. Every decision our organization makes is driven by the needs and dreams of the little girls that we serve.
More Than Me rap written by students, performed by Ruth the Rapper.
What is the current scale of your proposed innovation?
National - expansive reach within 1 country
Experience in Implementation Country(ies)
Yes, for more than one year.
Expertise in Sector
Yes, for more than a year.
We are registered in the U.S. and based in Liberia. Of our 65 staff, the majority are in Liberia, with three in the U.S. Our team in the US and Liberia talk daily and collaborate on decision making.
What is your organizational status?
Registered non-profit, charity, NGO, or community-based organization.
What is the maturity of your innovation?
Early Stage Innovation: exploring my innovation, refining, researching, and gathering inspiration.
How has your idea changed based on feedback?
Our idea has evolved tremendously, but specifically we figured out our goals around safety and health for girls:
-No “sex for grades” in schools, children know their rights
-Adoption of non-violent, non-physical, non-humiliating discipline at home and school = stress-free learning environment
-No unwanted pregnancies
-Gender parity in our schools
Success for us is evidence that girl’s rights are understood, respected, and enacted in our school communities. One way that we will measure this is gender parity in our schools. We also expect that by creating a safe place for dialogue around sexual and reproductive health, there may be an uptick in reports of sexual violence or exploitation. We will measure this and hope that over time we can reduce the instances of this through educational and cultural change methods. We also establish health clinics at each of our schools, which enables us to collect data on pregnancies among teenagers.
Who will implement this idea?
As part of our support for schools, we have a Parent Engagement Capacity Lead (CL) that works closely to build relationships with individuals and engage parents and leaders within each community. This CL will be a great asset for the women that are identified to lead this initiative. There will be one CL for every 5 schools.
Since we submitted our initial idea, we have gathered feedback and expanded the scope of this project. In each community we plan to identify a strong woman leader who is trained on this book and the supporting curriculum. Her title, as voted on by the girls and families, will be “Guardian of the Girls.” This person is a trusted, respected adult in the community and will help us to connect across the spectrum of leaders within each unique setting.
Using a human-centered design approach, you may uncover insights that lead to small or foundational changes to your organization’s existing strategy or processes in order to unlock the potential of your idea. How would your organization go about making such changes?
More Than Me is guided by the insights of the true experts: the girls we serve. We first ask the girls, “what’s best for you? What do you want? What do you need? How does this affect you?
MTM makes decisions by analyzing if an action supports our mission statement and serves our vision of every girl empowered. We assess the fit with our culture: Does this action embody love? Does it nurture positivity? Will our action relentlessly solve the problem at hand? Are we rewarding honesty? If the answers to these questions are “yes!” then we consider action.
Through our actions over the past 10 years, MTM demonstrated commitment to the girls and an openness to adapt to make it happen. We live by Nelson Mandela’s motto, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” And we add, “Now let’s do it.”
What challenges do your end-users face? (1) What is the biggest challenge that your end-users face on a day-to-day, individual level? (2) What is the biggest systems-level challenge that affects your end-users?
Day-to-day girls face the challenge of basic survival. Preventable and treatable illnesses kill them. Early childbirth kills them. Malnutrition kill them. In the long term, a lack of basic systems kills them. Broken health care systems allow epidemics like Ebola to spread. Broken justice systems allows rampant rape and abuse. Broken education systems threaten the hope that any of this might ever improve.
We believe education is the foundation and vehicle to improve every other broken system in Liberia. We start with the school and use that as the hub to address health, safety, and girls' rights.
Tell us about your vision for this project: (1) share one sentence about the impact you would like to see from this project in five years and (2) what is the biggest question you need to answer to get there?
By 2022 we hope that this book and curriculum has reached 1000 schools in Liberia, impacting over 250,000 children directly, and over 1 million community members. We hope to see an increase in gender parity, reduction in teen pregnancy, and reduction of sexual exploitation as a result.
Our biggest question is how de we change norms about sexual exploitation of girls? Can a community based approach, without governmental support, systems and enforcement work?
What is it that most attracted you to Amplify instead of a more traditional funding model?
During Ebola, in the most intense and scary of times, our team came together and sang a song. It went, "I am the hero, you are the hero, we are the heroes." It would echo, voice over voice, each morning as we sang before we went out to save lives, watch people die, and do everything we could to save Liberia.
We weren't health experts. We were just people listening to each other, working together, and fighting with everything we had to survive. Amplify respects that, so let's work together.
Do you intend to implement your Amplify idea in refugee camps / temporary settlements?
We aim to implement our Amplify idea in support of displaced populations, but not in a refugee camp / temporary settlement.
How long have you and your colleagues been working on this idea together?
How many of your organizations’s paid, full-time staff are currently based in the location where the beneficiaries of your proposed idea live?
Over 50 paid, full-time staff
Is your organization registered in the country you intend to implement your idea in?
We are registered in all countries where we plan to implement.
My organization's operational budget for 2016 was:
What do you need the most support with for your innovation?