FOCUSED WORKSHOPS FOR VULNERABLE YOUNG WOMEN

Recruitment survey

In each community across the intervention districts, the INSTRUCT district teams of young women fieldworkers identify vulnerable young women aged 15-29 years, not in school and not in work. To ensure they reach them all, including the most marginalized, they use respondent driven recruitment, an extension of respondent driven sampling, and information from community leaders, social workers, health workers and others. The fieldworkers then interview the young women about themselves and their knowledge and experience of applying to a range of government structural support programmes. They record the interview responses on Android handsets and later send the records to a secure central server, from which they can be downloaded as a dataset for analysis.

At the end of the interview, they use their handsets to show the young women video clips about available government support programmes. And they invite the young women to attend a workshop in the community to build their social and communication skills, learn about available government programmes and meet local programme officers.

The INSTRUCT team presented a poster about the findings from the ongoing recruitment survey up to October 2017 at the AIDSImpact conference in Cape Town, 13-15 November 2017. Among the 2908 young women respondents, many had multiple choice-disability factors (structural disadvantages), few had applied to support programmes, and even fewer had been successful in their applications.

The focused workshops

Each workshop takes place over two days and can take up to 40 participants (split into smaller groups). The sessions are highly interactive and help the young women participants to build their self-confidence and communication skills, as well as to share their life experiences to date and their aspirations for the future. On the second day of each workshop, local programme officers from government support programmes attend to give information and answer questions about their programmes.

In 2017, we began to follow up young women who had attended a focused workshop, to ask about whether they had applied to any government support programmes and their experience if they had applied. Some 1,339 young women attended a focused workshop in 2017; field teams contacted 431 of these for follow-up in 2017. Only a quarter of them had not applied to at least one government support programme. Some 132 reported success in their application (this included intermediate steps such as obtaining an ID card to allow application to programmes) and 145 were still waiting to hear.