Reach A Hand Uganda (RAHU)

I seek to afford my team of staff and volunteers the opportunity to tap into the organizational capacity development that will enable impactful delivery on our vision to live in a world where every young person can ably make informed life choices with the availability of Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) information and services. 

Reach A Hand Uganda, where I’m the Founder and CEO, has for the past decade, supported grassroot communities of young people to increase their access to lifesaving SRHR opportunities. We trained 943 SRHR peer educators who, through awareness work, extended HIV, modern contraception and SRHR information to 1,607,048 young people 10 - 24 years. In 2020 alone, when the COVID19 lockdown exposed young people especially teenage girls to sexual and gender based violence, we were able to avert teen pregnancy by delivering 15,473 modern contraceptive methods. 

Now at the 10 year mark, my task is to steer the team’s efforts to deliver sustainable impact to communities of adolescent girls, young women, young people living with HIV, with disability and young refugees in urban and rural communities of Uganda. With The Elevate Prize, we can expand our programs and impact to more young people. 

I am Humphrey Nabimanya, the Founder, CEO of Reach A Hand Uganda (RAHU). Born in a remote village in rural southwestern Uganda to a big family, I was orphaned at 6 years and raised by HIV positive guardians. In this setting, I experienced stigma from my immediate community - at home and school - through the shame, fear of disclosure and isolation that ignorance of HIV bore. At 14, with a passion to create awareness about HIV, I started volunteering as a peer educator, raising awareness on HIV prevention, positive living and youth empowerment in different schools and communities. In 2009, with some friends, we expanded our outreach to include; Sexual Reproductive Health Rights, HIV, positive peer association and behavioral change. I mobilized musicians and celebrities to endorse our messages within their fanbase of young people, and in 2011, with the vision to live in a world where every young person can ably make informed life choices with the availability of accurate information, I founded RAHU, a youth serving organization currently in 43 districts aiming to; expand awareness on SRHR information, strengthen access to service delivery and advocate for meaningful youth participation in the national and grassroots decision making processes. 

Globally, there are more young people than ever before. An estimated ~1.8 billion aged 10 - 24, many who live in developing countries where poverty is high and resources constrained*. As such, many will become sexually active before their 20th birthday resulting in high rates of early and unplanned pregnancies, unsafe abortions, maternal deaths and injuries, and sexually transmitted infections including HIV. More than half of all new HIV infections are among young people. The 2014 population census showed nearly 65% of Uganda’s population is below 35 years. There are nearly 10 million adolescents 10–19 years – 24.3% of the total population. Most live in rural areas - 81.8% adolescent girls, 84.6% adolescent boys (UBOS, 2014). Utilization of sexual and reproductive health services is key to their overall wellbeing since these aim to safeguard reproductive health. Poor sexual reproductive health results in increased morbidity, mortality, gender inequity, financial strain and slowing of national development. RAHU works to mitigate these outcomes by fronting young people at the centre of behavioral change through information dissemination efforts, linkages to service access, advocacy for gender equity and promotion of youth conscious development.

*https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2019/10/17/more-than-100-million-young-adults-are-still-living-in-extreme-poverty/

Recognizing the heterogeneity of our target audience, we aim to meet young people through  tools they can access, where they are. We combine the use of interpersonal (peer led), media (mainstream, digital), communication (local community radio, feature phones,  dialogue), partnerships (youth-adult, private sector) to mainstream the commonly perceived as taboo topic of sexual reproductive health and rights (SRHR). 

We prioritize and merge young people’s interests (music, the arts, sports, entrepreneurship) with SRHR information and service provision in a mash of edutainment. This way, we are able to easily mobilize and engage them on the difficult conversations of their sexual reproductive health through entry points of passions they care about. Our history being steeped in the use of celebrities and musicians as a pull factor for young people, we have expanded our network of cultural icons to fit the changing interests of our demographic. 

We communicate robustly on SRHR to our audiences. We actively develop and distribute SRHR specific content to facilitate engagement in mainstream spaces like digital media, community dialogues and youth spaces. By capturing the language and portrayal of specific target audiences, our work prioritizes increased engagement to allow for the demand for information, services and health seeking behavior.

The empowerment of vulnerable communities of young people to lead sexual reproductive health efforts has made our interventions stand out. Uganda is a largely conservative and patriarchal society where young people especially young women and girls are to be seen and not heard. Being disproportionately affected by negative SRHR outcomes like maternal mortality, HIV infections and Sexual Gender Based Violence, equipping groups of adolescent girls and young women, young people living with HIV, young people living with disability and young refugees with the requisite skills to create awareness, lead advocacy and demand quality services has enabled them to gain the agency to lead their own community change for sustained periods. 

Access to accurate, timely and consistent information on sexual reproductive health and rights of young people through means accessible to them (peers, media, role models like musicians, private sector partnerships) significantly improves their overall wellbeing. Through a decentralized peer-to-peer approach, we extend life-saving sexual reproductive health and rights information through trained peer educators to young people in communities via avenues most convenient to them. The youth (peer educator) - adult (health worker, district official, teacher) partnerships at community level boost their access to quality sexual reproductive health information and services.