TIDA, OVAL Engage Youths In Ibadan On How To Handle Mental, Sexual Reproductive Health Challenges, Others
•By Oyeniyi Awojoodu, Ibadan
IBADAN – No fewer than 20 young people have completed a comprehensive 3 – day training on various health challenges affecting students and Nigerians in general, just as the trainers showed their readiness to make use of their resolutions in helping solving the societal health related challenges.
The training themed, “Innovate 4 Impact Designathon 2.0”, organized by The Innovation and Design Thinking Academy (TIDA) funded by Our Voice As Light (OVAL) aimed at building the capacity of the young people in addressing the key health challenges in Ibadan and Nigeria at large.
Briefing journalists on the importance of the training at the NNLG Tech Hub Building, University of Ibadan on Sunday shortly after the training, the Co – Founder of TIDA, who also doubles as one of the Committee member of Impact Designathon 2.0, Dr AbdulHammed Babatunde noted that the rational behind the three days training is to build capacity of the young people to enable them solve various health challenges among their peers.
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AbdulHammed Babatunde a medical doctor stressed that it has been discovered that young people have the power and capacity to make a solution to the problems in their society.
The overall goal of the training according to AbdulHammed is to co-design and implement a youth led Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH)/Mental Health (MH)/Gender -Based Violence (GBV)/Climate Health (CH) movement through the development pf youth advocacy tools to support evidence -informed advocacy for a health accessible and equitable city such as Ibadan Metropolis.
He said, “This is the second edition of the innovate for impact Designathon 2.0 we had one last year, this is being implemented by non-governmental organization known as “Our Voice As Light (OVAL) initiative which are the primary funder, while The Innovation and Design Thinking Academy (TIDA) is implementation partner. So the rationale behind this is that we believe that young people have the power and the capacity to make a solution to the problems in their society.
“This year we are focusing on health advocacy trying to build capacity of young people to be able to address key health challenges in Ibadan.
“We are focusing on Ibadan City and we are focusing on four major areas where the young people are being affected and these are sexual reproductive health because of the prevalent of sexually transmitted diseases and we’ve discovered that this is very high among the young people and the second one is climate health because the climate change will also affect the young people that we live longer to witness the adverse effects of the climate change, these are the set of the people that will suffer the consequences of the effects done to the climate and it will affect their health, while the third one is the gender based violence and this is very important especially recently where we have cases of adolescents and girl child being sexually abused, harassed and assaulted and the forth one is the mental health, because young people have the most highest rate of mental health diseases because most of these diseases happened at the very tender age, that is why we are focusing on that four areas.
“We want the young people to develop this and solve the problems for their young counterpart.
“This is a 72 hour program, meaning that we’ve started three days ago, so today we are wrapping it up, we started at the UI hotel and what we did is to provide some tool kits that they can use in identifying the root cause analysis and trying to know the power analysis, we have them the tool kits and the training of design thinking of what are the actual problems and how to understand them, how to address it and who are the stakeholders they need to work with in addressing those issues, and then what are the resources that are on ground, and how they can carry out these projects and we’ve designed four months post designathon program whereby we will be meeting them to guide them more on how they will be implementing these projects.
“So basically designathon has 20 participants and five in each team, we have four facilitators who are mentors, they are also you g people but they have actually done some of these things before and we have four experts which are people with decades of experience, working in these areas. This is the idea behind this program and also we have five steering committees who are the primary organizers and three volunteers.
“At the end of this Nigerian should be expecting more from us, though we are starting from Ibadan this year, the climate health team are focusing on Bodija axis of Ibadan metropolis, while the gender based violence team are focusing on our secondary schools within Ibadan metropolis, but after the implementation phase we still hope to project this program to other cities as we are hoping to have more collaborators so we can start implementing it in other cities and we can as well sustain the one we are currently doing in Ibadan, so the aim is to build the young people who are not complaining but actually solving the problem and leading the change and be active in their communities.” Dr AbdulHammed Babatunde said.
In his words, a renowned psychiatric Consultant and a senior lecturer at the University of Ibadan, Dr Jibril Abdulmalik gave insight into University of Ibadan programmes in addressing mental health challenges and other related issues among the students in the campus.
He said, “The University of Ibadan have been very proactive about the promoting the well-being of mental health of its students.
“The University has established a student mental health committee, and I’m serving as one of the two co-chairs of that committees working directly under the Dean of Students Affairs, where we have the President and vice President of the students union government as statutory members of that committee. The committee has just draft a mental health policy for students in campus, so that policy will be ratify by the Vice Chancellor and it will be presented to the Senate and once it’s approved it can then be implemented.
“We know many mental health problems start from the youthful age, and we don’t want anything that will negatively affect their academic studies that would get them derailed or have to make drop out of school and all things like that, so they need all the necessary support, attention and care,so that they can get their lives back in track received the necessary treatment and they are able to complete their education and be a productive member of the society. Dr Jibril said.
Speaking with journalists about the achievement of their team, a student of European University Georgia, Master Rest Essence said, “I’m an advocate for mental health at the Innovate for impact Designathon 2.0 training, my team members and I have been able to come up with a solution that is aim at addressing the stigma around mental health that the students of University of Ibadan are facing with and we’ve found out that so many students of the University of Ibadan do not even talk about it, because of the fact that there is a stigma around the mental health generally and we did an insightful research and we found out that the workload by the academic curriculum here in Nigeria, especially at the University of Ibadan has a lot of pressure on so many of these students.
“Because of this development we are advocating for a resolutions that will help students recognize stress management awareness, so many students don’t have a good work balance and they think it’s just a stress from the school that is affecting them but we’ve come to realize that so many students felt like they’ve stressed by the school but you’ll realized that when they get home they have enough time for social media and before you find out they’re already warned out for the second day at school.
“So in most cases these students think it’s a work stress load from school, but they didn’t realize that they didn’t have a work balance, so our resolutions include work balance, where we will be inviting experts to talk about how students can have a very good work balance but not only limited to that, we’ve discovered that some students have stigma around them, they’re already feeling depressed and they don’t talk about it and they think the next thing they can do is to commit suicide, they see the suicide as the next best option and we’ve heard cases of attempted suicide in the University of Ibadan, so one of our resolutions is targeting towards addressing the stigma around the mental health.” Rest Essence stated.
In her contribution, Tijani Ruth, a 200 level Computer Science student of University of Ibadan, who is a participant of Innovative 4 Impact Designathon 2.0, said “we’ve been here for this program for the past three days and it is very interesting, we’ve been here developing ideas and solving societal problems ranging from mental health to sexual reproductive health, climate health and gender based violence.
She said, “I belong to sexual and reproductive health, so myself and my team members are leveraging on the everyday information technology to bridge the knowledge gap and misconception on the use of contraceptives among the students most especially the students of University of Ibadan because that’s where we are starting from for now.
“We will be making use of WhatsApp and Instagram to reach out to these students and we will also be making use of Family and Reproductive Health (FRH) experts that will be on these social media platforms to try and correct whatever misconception that they have, we will also be making use of everyday stories to educate them that truly people have fall victim out of ignorance and how they can correct this in their own lives to ensure that they did not repeat these mistakes again, or they did not make them at all, so that is what we are basically doing.” Ruth said.