Niko Locked

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  A Life Skills Workshop at Kameji Secondary School before schools were closed due to Covid 19

Inspiration

Dear Friends, The past few months have been tough for each one of us because of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Much as it has been difficulty for everyone, it has been a lot more harsh and rough for teenage girls in my county Nyamira.
I was recently saddened by local media reports indicating that since the outbreak of Covid-19; at least 2,741 teenage girls in Nyamira County have been impregnated. At the same time, there is a surge of cases of defilement, rape, sexual harassment, FGM and other forms of gender-based violence targeted on teenage girls. This trend which will curtail the education and life prospects of thousands of teenage girls is gross, grave, and unacceptable.

What it does

Niko Locked is a mobile-phone based advocacy program that will provide life skills education targeting to positively influence behaviour among teenage girls to improve their Sexual and Reproductive Health. Most of the girls in our community are lured to early sexual debut because of a lack of sufficient and appropriate life-skills education. The program will thus empower teenage girls to understand their rights and use the knowledge to ‘say no’ as well as identify and report instances of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

The Niko Locked program will also boost confidence and self-esteem among teenage girls to believe in themselves so as to improve their abilities to make informed decisions to abstain from sex until marriage. This will help them focus on their education and follow their dreams so as to bring positive change in the community. Niko Locked will place mothers at the centre of offering Life Skills Education by inspiring mothers to take proactive roles of teaching girls to abstain and avoid teenage pregnancies. Therefore, the program will empower mothers to increase their capacity in impacting their daughters, nieces or other young girls with life skills that can end teenage pregnancy.

Program participants will be mobilized to register and receive at least 1 daily offline text message (short message service, SMS) over the next 6 months using an automated sustem. Mothers who will register will be encouraged to share their phones with their daughters or allow them access since most teenage girls do not have access to mobile phones. The program will also develop the NikoLocked mobile App to stimulate active program engagement through interactive features such as Q&A (question and answer), essay and picture contests, and integration of a friendly competition with prizes in which program users will collect credits with each interaction.

How I built it

This project is as result of my passion for girls and women empowerment. The prevailing challenges that girls in my community are facing daily fuelled my burning desire to provide a solution.

Through design thinking, I purposed to provide a solution to the problem of teenage pregnancies. I interviewed various stakeholders including teenage girls themselves, mothers, men, medical doctors, social workers, and civil society organizations so as to understand the need. Through the interviews, I gained insights which re-defined the problem of teen pregnancies in ways that I had not seen it before. This informed me to re-design my solution prototype which I tested with the civil society network in Nyamira.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge while prototyping and testing this solution was the inability to travel freely, meet target audiences or organize focus group discussions due to Covid 19 prevention protocols.

Lack of finances to run a wider scale pilot project or conduct an extensive baseline survey or a situational analysis was also a challenge.

Finally, another challenge I encountered was a negative attitude of indifference and apathy among some of the adults in the community who gave blanket condemnation of the younger generation, saying they are irredeemable.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

In the process of prototyping and testing this solution, I have managed to mobilize a network of civil society organizations implementing projects targeting teenage girls. The civil society organizations are drawn from every Ward of Nyamira County. Through this piloting with the civil society organizations, I have been able to reach and mentor 40 teenage girls. Through the civil society network, I am testing the solution through a fully automated MobileCoach system, which is available as an open-source resource.

What I learned

In the process of testing and prototyping this solution, I realized that the two main reasons why Nyamira County struggles with the problem of teenage pregnancies are because of high rates of poverty and harmful cultural practices. Poverty is a huge driver of teenage pregnancies since the girls are lured and coerced with gifts, food or bodaboda lifts. At the same time, right from childhood, girls are socialized into feeling inferior to boys and staying submissive hence they are denied access to opportunities which can make open doors for a better future which leads to lack of confidence, low self-esteem, and stress, which put the girls at risk of teenage pregnancies.

What's next for Niko Locked

Niko Locked is ready for implementation and growth to scale.