Pregnancy is the biggest killer of teenage girls worldwide. A horrifying one million teenage girls die or suffer serious injury, infection or disease due to pregnancy every year. World leaders are getting together on Wednesday to discuss this – and other issues surrounding the 215 million women across the developing world who don't have control over their fertility – at the London Family Planning Summit.
The Guardian Teacher Network has some powerful teaching resources to help children understand the issues in class or at home.
Marie Stopes International has created a set of lessons for secondary school-aged children as part of their Make Women Matter Campaign. The five lessons have been built around a set of short films on the personal experiences of women in Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, South Africa and Uganda. Brenda's Battle is a lesson plan based on the issue of safe and unsafe abortion for girls and women in the developing world. Bwindi's Babies explores the issue of access to quality healthcare services for pregnant women in remote areas. A tale of two mothers looks at access to modern contraception and the value of choice over chance. Zainabu's decision investigates long-acting permanent methods of contraception and the life-saving impact they can have on women, and Love and Life, Live on Air looks at the issues of sex, relationships, sex education, first-time sex and the important decisions that girls and women all round the world make. With the high teenage pregnancy rates in the UK, many of the issues raised here will be relevant in UK classrooms. All the films can be viewed on the Marie Stopes website www.makewomenmatter.org. Students can also learn more about where the films were made in these country fact sheets, South Africa, Uganda, Bangladesh and Sierra Leone.
Maternal health is one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG5) set in 2000, with the aim of reducing the maternal mortality rate by three quarters by 2015. With only three years left to go, MDG5 is the furthest of all the goals from meeting its target, which makes the the Family Planning summit all the more vital.
Oxfam has a useful introduction to the Millennium Development Goals and a worksheet on MDG5 worksheet on MDG5 focusing on Sierra Leone. Marie Stopes also has fact sheets on MDGs and Maternal health, Reproductive health issues, Global facts on maternal health, Pregnancy and safe motherhood, Why women matter plus a useful Glossary of terms.
Oxfam are running a schools project on birth rights in Ghana, which gives schools the resources and help to create their own pop-up birth rights exhibition. Birth Rights is a 15-minute Powerpoint presentation, focusing on Ghana, to help children understand the issues surrounding maternal health. It comes with a teachers' script and is suitable for upper primary school-aged children as well as secondary.
Oxfam's Birth Rights classroom activities explore what it's like to have a baby in Ghana and Birth Rights: Action guide for young people helps students plan and take their own action based on what they have learnt. You can also download a Birth Rights postcard, booklet, poster and welcome board.
Save the Children has created the Give Girls Power game, which takes users on a journey through the eyes of a 16-year-old girl living in the developing world and the dilemmas she has. After playing, students can take action by signing Save the Children's petition on maternal health and emailing David Cameron on the issue – take action now and he may read it before the summit on Wednesday! There are lots of useful facts in Save the Children's report Every Woman's right and you will find a summary of the report that can be used in class here.
And finally, students can discover that the condom dates back to the 1500s (credited to Dr Condom who is said to have designed a cloth sheath for King Charles II who wanted to limit the number of illegitimate children he fathered) and find out about the first oral contraception back in 1300 BC (a possibly ineffective combination of beer, celery and oil heated and drunk over four days as recorded in the Berlin Papyrus) in this fascinating history of contraception.
The Guardian Teacher Network has more than 100,000 pages of lesson plans and interactive materials. To see and share for yourself go to teachers.theguardian.com. There are also thousands of teaching, leadership and support jobs on the site visit schoolsjobs.theguardian.com.