Health education is the process of enabling young people to increase knowledge to improve their health. An important part is a sexual and reproductive health. We organized a health workshop on the “Sexual Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR)” for our 11th and 12th grade youth.
In fact, the school-based sexual and reproductive health education is becoming one of the most important ways to help teenagers to recognize and prevent risks as well as improve their reproductive health. However, because of the cultural barriers, this topic is not effectively presented by teachers in Nepalese Schools. Therefore adolescent people do not get the proper understanding of the sexual and reproductive health education.
During the workshop, they had an opportunity for sharing their knowledge and contrast ideas. Besides these, we also tried to remove misconceptions about some topics such as sex and sexuality, contraceptives and menstrual cycles. In a second session, youth were divided into two groups and they were asked to explain different changes (emotional, physical and social changes) that they are experimenting during their puberty.
Overall the health session was very effective and they were very keen to learn it. We found they would have positive effects on the factors that determine risky sexual behaviors, by increasing awareness and knowledge about reproductive health, contraceptives, menstrual cycle, pregnancy, safe abortion services.
