Young persons and reproductive health: Devcoms, journalists, bloggers, others brainstorm in Kaduna
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NIGERIA –
As critical stakeholders continue to develop strategies to extend better life planning campaign to adolescents and youths in Nigeria, Development Communications (Devcoms) and journalists working around Family Planing on Thursday brainstorm on safe spaces to discuss Life Planning for Adolescents and Youths (LPAY) in Kaduna State without being confrontational with religion and cultural values.
The Nigerian Urban Reproductive Health Initiative (NURHI 2) had recently launched LPAY campaign targeted at young persons and aimed at helping them plan their life for better future.
Now, there is the need for better way to discuss reproductive health issues including family planning, education and personal hygiene among others that enhance qualitative lifetime with this group of people in such a way they will get the message and apply same into their daily living.
One of the safe spaces identified is social media. With the advent of social media as a result of technological breakthrough, these young persons have got to make use of one social media platform or the other to process information.
At a media roundtable in Kaduna, A Kaduna-based blogger, and young person herself, Judith Caleb in a paper titled: ‘Practical Ways to Introducing Adolescents and Youth to Reproductive Health Information’ said, threads on particular subject on Twitter for example, could be used to deliver salient messages that can transform lives of young persons who stumble on such information.
The young lady discouraged voluminous piece when targeting young persons because the present generation do not have appetite for long essays.
“Succinct chronological arrangement of the message, simple and brief will help us read and apply information that concern us. We are more on Facebook, Instagram and Tweeter and any of these can serve as safe space you can use to engage us and we will listen.
“You can turn your threads into posts on Facebook by removing the harshtag.
“Videos are also very important. Everybody wants to watch, nobody wants to read anymore. You can do short videos, like 60 seconds that can also fit into Instagram.
“Another thing we can do in Northern Nigeria is using a popular topic like Almajiri. We can use it to talk about LPAY. And it would attract a lot of interest.
“Pictures can also be used. When you post something with a picture it is captivating and attention is shifted towards that”, she noted.
Earlier, Fausiat Bakare, who spoke on behalf of Devcoms had enjoined the participants to take the LPAY campaign to anywhere they may found themselves at any time so more people can hear about it and step it down to others.