A Visit with FRIDA Grantees Copper Rose
At the end of May, Boikanyo Modungwa, FRIDA’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Officer visited our grantee partner Copper Rose in Lusaka, Zambia.
Copper Rose, a FRIDA grantee partner since December 2015, is changing the lives of young women and girls by educating them on their sexual and reproductive health rights and responsibilities.
Here’s what Boikanyo got up to in Zambia:
“During my visit, the group held their bi-monthly talks at Chongwe Secondary School, a high school located in the village of Chongwe approximately 60 kilometers outside of Lusaka – the capital city of Zambia. The mentorship talks serve as a space for discussing sexual and reproductive health issues. During my visit – the talk was on avoiding pregnancy and discussing managing relationships while still in high school.
The “talk” was more of a guided discussion, which included role-playing and giving space to each girl to share their experiences and to ask questions. The visit to the school also included giving the girls their monthly supply of sanitary towels; the main aim of which is to give girls who are unable to buy sanitary towels themselves to attend school even during their period.”
FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund was the group’s first institutional funder. Before that, when Copper Rose first began, they raised approximately 3000 kwacha (approx 300 USD) by walking door to door on their university campus requesting donations from other students. The group currently does a number of campaigns to get individual donors to support their sanitary towel campaign and to establish a reusable sanitary towel program where members of the communities where they work are trained to make the sanitary towels.
Copper Rose used their grant from FRIDA to train 20 volunteers to make sure that they were equipped with the correct information to share with the girls (and sometimes boys) who they meet with when doing school visits. They trained the volunteers on technical issues such as being able to explain the difference between HIV and AIDS, to tackle the more complex issues like teen sexual relationships all the way through to training on ice-breakers and creating safe space.
FRIDA’s project “Strengthening Young Feminist Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa” integrates learning visits and the collection of baseline data into the overall project design. These visits provide an opportunity for FRIDA to connect with our grantee partners in Sub-Saharan Africa in person, with the objective of collecting baseline data but also providing support to grantees to create relevant monitoring and evaluation tools and processes, so they are stronger and more sustainable as a result of their FRIDA grant.
Some more photos from Boikanyo’s visit:
One of the girls explaining some of the challenges that teenage mothers face in their community during a mentoring session.
Boikanyo (right) meets the group and thanks them for sharing their session with her.
Later that month, the group held a public walk with the theme “Menstrual Hygiene matters to everyone everywhere”.
