CONCEPT SUMMARY SIX (6):
Economic Empowerment In Adolescent Girls Vulnerable To Prostitution And Hiv/Aids

PROJECT SUMMARY AND EXPECTED OUTCOMES

Overall Goal

The overall goal is to bring changes in the individual thinking and behaviour pattern of various groups – the adolescent girl, the family of the adolescent girl, and the members of the community and members of the prostitution market around Salima Boma.

Specific Objectives and Expected Results

• To empower the adolescent girls within and around Salima Boma in order to enable them to deal with factors of vulnerability to the prostitution market.

• To provide skills-development to adolescent girls within and around Salima Boma towards preventing vulnerability to prostitution.

• To provide functional literacy to adolescent girls within and around Salima Boma towards empowering them to deal with factors those cause their forced entry into the prostitution market.

• To provide awareness to adolescent girls within and around Salima Boma related to factors of vulnerability to the prostitution market.

• To offer CRIDOC staff with institutional knowledge through monitoring and documentation of the project outcomes and issues.

Project Description

According to the CHRR survey on Adolescent Commercial Sex Workers way back in 1998, the young adolescent girls are not allowed the opportunities that other children have during that development stage. Not being able to go to school and not having had any opportunity of learning or utilising skills, these girls do not have the benefit of any productive time to themselves.

Since the commissioning of the survey in 1998, there has not been any meaningful programme intervention to respond to the problems that the survey established. There is, therefore, a great need to build strengths in these individual adolescent girls so as to protect them from their vulnerability to prostitution and prevent them from being introduced into the prostitution market. There is also an equally great need to work with the family and the community towards bringing change in the prostitution market and in the stakes offered by it.

In terms of project evolvement/development process, CRIDOC conducted two-day needs assessment consultations in Salima starting from 6th and 7th March 2008. The consultations were done through normal conversation as well as through the administration of a questionnaire where specific questions were read out to the respondents. The overall aim of the consultations was to make a follow-up on how many projects/initiatives had been put in place as interventions to address some of the fundamental findings of the CHRR survey ten years down the line. The other objective was also to make a rapid assessment of how much impact have such initiatives/projects, if any, made in the district.

Overall, the effect of the problem identified in the project locality (as per the CHRR survey) not being attended to is a slow anomalous acceptance of the unexpressed yet widely practiced norm of exploitation of the girl-child, the sexual abuse of the child, and of child prostitution. There is a growing lackadaisical attitude and apathy not just towards this inhuman treatment of the girl-children of the community but also even towards the girl-child of one's own family. The occurrence of the prostitution of a child becomes a common phenomenon that no longer summons the sensitivity or even attention of the community not only in Salima, but also even in most parts of the country.

We therefore envisage that the outcomes of the project will be used as best practices for the replication to other districts within the country, since the lessons learnt will be disseminated using various IEC and advocacy methods, such as the distribution of the video documentary and newsletters, to various key stakeholders, posters, use of the available news media, exchange visits, etc.

Interventions to address the problem identified will also empower the girl as well as their families to resist any temptations or bribes being offered to them by the members of the prostitution market, such as unscrupulous brothel-keepers. There would be an overall impact on controlling the crime of child prostitution. The interventions would also have a positive impact on the phenomenon of the HIV/AIDS risks.

The most direct consequence of not addressing the problem is in terms of the continuous inflow of girls into prostitution. Besides the illegal activity of child prostitution being precipitated, there are children being subjected to the dangers of innumerable health hazards and to various types of sexual abuse and exploitation.

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