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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Education and Promotion
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1329425
This article is part of the Research Topic Moving Beyond Tokenism: Toward Sustainable Youth Engagement to Improve the Implementation of Public Health Programs and Interventions View all 3 articles

Realising agency: insights from participatory research with learners in a South African sexual and reproductive health programme

Provisionally accepted
Chelsea Coakley Chelsea Coakley 1,2*Devyn Lee Devyn Lee 3Carey Pike Carey Pike 1Laura Myers Laura Myers 1Miriam A. Hartmann Miriam A. Hartmann 4Linda-Gail Bekker Linda-Gail Bekker 5
  • 1 Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, Department of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
  • 2 Centre for Social Science Research, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
  • 3 Other, Cape Town, South Africa
  • 4 Women's Global Health Imperative, RTI International, Durham, North Carolina, United States
  • 5 Department of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Investing in the capabilities of adolescents is essential to achieving the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, which focus on realising adolescent girls and young women's (AGYW) rights to education, health, bodily autonomy and integrity, sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and well-being. Despite significant scientific and programmatic progress in understanding and responding to their unique and intersecting vulnerabilities, AGYW continue to face disproportionate risk of STIs, HIV and early pregnancy. In South Africa, increasing rates of adolescent pregnancy, persistent and disproportionate HIV infections and the syndemic interactions between negative health outcomes amongst AGYW call for urgent, tailored interventions, which stand to be improved by early and meaningful engagement of AGYW in intervention design and delivery. Comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is a critical component of securing universal access to SRH and rights for all adolescents. School-based CSE programmes have demonstrated improvements in learners' SRH, as indicated by increased HIV knowledge, delayed sexual debut, improved self-efficacy to engage in safer sex, and reduced sexual risk behaviours. The participatory sub-study generated lessons for future implementation through collaborative methods, and provides further insight into the quantitative biomedical and socio-behavioural findings of the larger study. This study successfully employed a Youth-Participatory Action Research (YPAR) approach to augment qualitative data collection from SKILLZ participants. YPAR was firstly found to be acceptable to both the YIs and their participant peers and secondly, it could generate high-quality research data that enriched understanding of the impact of SKILLZ.

    Keywords: Participatory Research, youth & adolescence, Intervention research, Sexual and reproductive health, Health Promotion

    Received: 28 Oct 2023; Accepted: 20 Mar 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Coakley, Lee, Pike, Myers, Hartmann and Bekker. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Chelsea Coakley, Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, Department of Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 7925, Western Cape, South Africa

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.