Mildmay Kenya: Magnet Theatre Project

By working within communities in Siaya County, the Magnet Theatre Project was envisaged to bring together young people to access and contribute to the dialogue about HIV, sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) and to demand instigation and utilisation of the services related to HIV/SRHR.
Theatre is a highly effective means of effectively mobilising and teaching large groups of people in a short time.
Young people are able to make informed choices when they are provided with the right information, in the right way and at the right time, and there is no better way than through theatre.
Magnet Theatre is a form of community theatre that typically takes place in outdoor, public spaces
Its intervention is designed to entertain, educate and involve audience members in the action, encouraging the kind of participation and reflection that is key to sustained behaviour change.
The hour-long performances explore issues affecting a community and encourage discussion and problem solving with audience members. The actors perform a drama that presents a dilemma based on community issues. The audience participates by offering suggestions to the characters or by taking the place of an actor and acting out solutions to the dilemma.
Magnet Theatre encourages audience members to discuss solutions and allows them to experiment in a safe environment, to encourage individual and community-wide change.
Magnet Theatre is different from other forms of community theatre because it targets and attracts a specific and repeat audience, takes place at a regular time at a specific venue, and serves as a forum for magnification of behaviour change.
Magnet Theatre has produced some of Mildmay Kenya’s most visible examples of behaviour change.
More to be done:
The “KAA RADA KUWA SMARTTA” programme (an urban dialect expression meaning be careful, be wise) is an educational theatre project targeting young people in Siaya County.
The project uses performances and community theatre to raise awareness and understanding of sex, sexuality and HIV by retelling the true stories of young people. Through this engagement, we help children, young people, and their families to access HIV testing, treatment and sexual health services. The performances will promote diversity, compassion and understanding, and encourage networking between young people to advocate for better HIV and SRHR in their area.
Through theatre, we want to inspire young people to take action and speak up about barriers to HIV prevention, care and treatment in Siaya county.
Challenges
There remains the need to reach more young people through theatre and to include governance and its effect on service delivery.
If young people cannot relate governance and its effect on access to quality healthcare, education or employment opportunities, then the chance to see an empowered generation will be lost.
Besides this project, there is little investment by the government in the arts, whether visual or performing arts.
Snapshot of activities that support the Magnet Theatre Project:
We conducted 5-day Magnet Theatre training for 10 volunteer young people who have been supporting the outreach sessions. The young people are meant to mentor their peers who will in turn volunteer to conduct edutainment sessions at community level to mobilise young people to access RH/HIV information and services.
We conducted two Magnet Theatre sessions to support the mobilisation of young people to attend World AIDS Day. This yielded 215 young people attending, 49 girls accessing HPV vaccine, 32 were screened for cervical cancer, 15 accessed family planning services and 102 accessed HIV testing services.
We conducted a 2-day Sensitisation Workshop for 15 youth group leaders on HIV prevention, care and treatment so that they give the correct information whilst mentoring their teams for theatre.
We had a meeting with the Sub-County Health Management Teams to discuss program progress and challenges to future plans. This also provided a forum to make some members understand how they could use Magnet Theatre for health promotion in their various departments.
We conducted a one-day quarterly youth group leaders workshop for 10 leaders to reflect on the successes and mitigation of challenges in this programme.
Objectives
During the project period, we reached over 16,000 young people with HIV and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights information and services through the integrated community outreaches.
Several activities were arranged during outreach to saturate the young people with as much information as possible as well as ensure that they were linked to the services based on need.
Objective 1: To increase the number of young people (10-25) in Siaya County who access HIV testing and increase the number of young people with access to medication
During the period, the Magnet theatre groups mobilised young people aged 10-25 years to access information on HIV, SRH during the community based-outreaches, particularly HIV information and testing services. A total of 16,800, received HIV education while 12800 received actual testing services with 33 Diagnosed with HIV and linked to HIV treatment and care.
The young people living with HIV have also been linked support groups where they can access psychological and adherence counselling whilst sharing experiences and follow-up by their HIV positive peers.
We have also trained some of them on PEER EDUCATION and Mentored them on Magnet Theatre service delivery so that they use the skills during their support group meetings to pass information on treatment literacy and adherence in interesting and captivating ways.
Objective 2: To increase the knowledge of sexual and reproductive health rights of 15,000 young people in Siaya County) knowledge of SRHR and ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ each year
The level of knowledge on SRH issues for 16,800 young people was improved by attending the Magnet Theatre sessions alongside being given information on human rights, HIV and Law.
The messages were developed in conjunction with field staff, theatre 'Trainers of Trainers' (ToTs) and the reproductive health coordinator.
There was increase in access of SRH services among young girls and women with the clinical team setting aside special days for SRH information sharing within selected facilities that the young people preferred.
These forums were also used to drive cervical cancer screening and prevention campaigns which saw 243 girls access the HPV vaccine. 65 underage girls were also referred for antenatal care and enrolled into teenage mothers support groups, we enrolled a further 623 on family planning in the process of comprehensive outreaches.
Objective 3: To increase young people’s creativity, imagination, critical thinking skills on SRHR
We want to produce 138 (18 trainers of trainers and 120 theatre troupe trainees) experts in SRHR who can advocate and leverage demand for SRHR services for young people each year.
10 representative members of Ulusi Youth group, Bondo Youth Goup, Bondo Comedian Youth Group, Amkeni Youth group and a network of youth groups called Rarieda Community Network of Youths (RACONET) were trained as theatre group trainees. Additionally, 2 members from the groups were trained as ToTs. These trainees and TOTs further mentored 5 members each per group making an additional 50 Magnet Theatre providers.
The young people currently create their own content whether satire or comedy and stage shows at the market places, football tournaments, landing beaches etc. which are the common social places and events to reach young people in Siaya County which is largely rural.
This has culminated to vibrant villages with village, religious and administrative leaders tasking to include other organisations and requesting more services than we envisaged. We hope to continue mentoring more youth to support the expansion of our work.
Objective 4: To raise awareness about SRHR and HIV issues in the broader public among 15,000 young people, using the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ format, each year.
These performances will mobilise not only the players, but also the audience and actors to critically reflect on SRHR issues facing adolescents and young people.
The project capitalises on community events like sports, and national health and patriotic days to pass on messages related to HIV and SRH. The Magnet Theatre technique took centre stage as it allowed the audience to be involved in the problem solving. This allowed us to collect opinions directly from the people without getting into so much research details in a short while.
We combined 6 of the sessions reaching 300 girls and boys with “know your rights” campaigns where we had pro bono lawyers who came and talked about HIV and SRH rights in relation to access to health services and gender-based violence.
This led to a legal clinic, due to the violations that were reported by young people. We have since referred 5 young girls for legal redress due to defilement cases.
Siaya County
Siaya county in Kenya is a poor region that falls far behind the national progress made in fighting HIV. The burden of HIV in Siaya stands at 24.8%. In the province where Siaya County is located, 6.2% of youth aged 15-24 are living with HIV. This is three-times higher than the national youth HIV prevalence rate.
Thank you.
We are grateful to the Make a Difference (MAD) Trust for supporting this project in 2019
Thanks to this support, we have additionally been able to incorporate music, drama, poetry and other project activities which have made them more vibrant.
The health promotion department of the Ministry of Health has engaged with the project and learned better ways to reach youth. “This project you are doing in the village, has made it easy for my officers to give health talks in a very simple and fun way” Says Chieng’, the County Health Promotion Officer in Siaya County.
Because of MAD Trust funding, Mildmay has been invited by several youth groups to mentor their peers and we have reached 50 more young people through 'Trainers of Trainees' than the project originally envisaged.
