Teen Talk - Dominica

Young participants in the advocacy project worked with health professionals, health educators, and media specialists to design Teen Talk. The programme format was determined by youth working in groups that were formed through a series of participatory workshops held in Dominica in October, 2000. This methodology was designed to help maximise the appeal of the radio series to a broad range of young people in Dominica, including poorer and illiterate sections of the youth community who could not be reached through schools and who were often excluded from formal health education interventions. In addition, the project's design was intended to help young people secure future employment by equipping them with the skills needed to be creative and to explore issues from their own perspective.

Specific topics addressed in the radio series included sexual health, hygiene, and disease avoidance issues, as well as more general issues relating to teenage sexuality and lifestyle.

To supplement the series, Multi-Media Resource Kits were developed. These kits included copies of the radio programmes on audio cassette supplemented by written materials for the use by a youth facilitator within a workshop environment.

Youth, Health, Family Planning.

An outgrowth of the youth advocacy project is the RfD/International Planned Parenthood Inter Regional Learning Initiative, which will link young people in the Caribbean with their peers in island states in other parts of the world. The purpose of this four-year programme is to increase young people's access to both radio and television, as well as to provide peer educators with contemporary and culturally sensitive resources for teaching life skills and sexual and reproductive health issues.