ACHIEVING COMMUNITY CHANGE THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

Creating change in a community is shifting or transforming a community from current state to a desired future state. In creating change the quality of life of the community must be understood as the aim of the change is to enhance the quality of life through a collaboration research and action.
In other to have a voice for collaboration with my community I joined an NGO (Business and Professional Women (BPW) which is a network of women. The NGO comprises of Business Women, Medical Doctors, Pharmacists, Lawyers, IT Consultants, Lecturers and other Professions.
Our goal of making changes in our community encourage us to initiate the Child Sexual Abuse project in secondary schools and the Human Capacity Development project for members by having a fifteen minutes health and development talk at all our meetings.
Objectives :
1. To pass down extensive knowledge in sex education to young girls and boys.
2. To reduce the incidence of rape cases, sexual abuse, incest, unwanted pregnancies and sexual transmitted diseases of young girls.
3. To broaden their knowledge on the dangers of premature exposure to sex to their future.
4. To increase the overall self esteem.
The national implementation of this project will make the youths to contribute their full social and economic potential as they need the right knowledge and skills to make the right choices about when to have sex and how to protect themselves from infection, unwanted pregnancies and to achieve positive behavior.
Challenges and Barriers:
• Getting the program started,
• Keeping the program going,
• Scaling the program from small pilot project to the national level,
• Making the program effective at the level of individual student or school,
• Some teachers and school administrators find sexuality education personally an objection due to lack of sufficient understanding and refuse to go along with the program.
• The family health education that is in place does not give students information on sexual practice in large partly because of strong resistance from parent and religious leaders.
• Political leaders are reluctant to risk a religious backslash by openly supporting sexuality education.
Solutions:
i. Allaying the fear of the community leaders and parents by mobilizing support for the program through the demonstration of the magnitude of youth health problems.
ii. Enlisting the support of traditional leaders and religious leaders.
iii. Open communication through media and a more personal level.
iv. Involvement of caring adult such as teachers, parent and other.
v. Mobilizing the community.
vi. Applying gradual approach to area of controversy.
vii. Creating advocacy with Government.
viii. Involving girls and boys in the advocacy
ix. Mass education of women and youth in IT literacy
Therefore, the most important of these listed solutions is the IT literacy which gives the women and youth the power to become part of the global village and access the latest information on social media such as Pulse Wire, Facebook and others. This helps to remove the taboo from discussing youth sexuality and can provide information, redefine social norms and change attititudes and behaviors