HDI is a strong advocate of child’s right, reproductive health rights and responsibilities. In pursuit of this we organise an annual leadership training/workshop for adolescents at the Child’s Right Educational Training Center of Human Development Initiatives. The purpose of the workshop is to provide the adolescents with experience of being able to make a difference in their world through their actions; build up their resistance against negative peer pressure with sessions on leadership exercise, talent development and other relevant topics such as Reproductive Health and Rights, Career Information and Counselling, Leadership Styles and Skills, Body Image, Principles of Savings and Financial management among others.
Youths are usually trained on how to make different arts and crafts to prepare them for entrepreneurship and taken to visit different organisations.
Some organisations visited in the past include: Dangote Plant, The Nation newspaper, Nigerian Breweries, among others.
Valentine‘s Day which is celebrated on the 14th of February every year is important to many young people, as they look for relationships, become carried away by the fun-fare, fantasies and fallacies thereby making them vulnerable to reproductive health abuses.
HDI has over the years leveraged on Valentine’s Day celebrations to organize several training and events for youths. These include school debate competitions, health awareness training, sexual and reproductive health training; self-development workshop among others.
These special workshops often feature varieties such as songs, drama, entertainment, as well as the distribution of IEC materials on reproductive health rights.
The adolescent feedback and communication project of HDI tagged Happy and Sad boxes has turned out to be highly successful. This enables the organisation listen to the pains and cries of in-school youths, while remaining anonymous. These boxes which are divided into two parts with a brightly-coloured part called happy and the dark-coloured part tagged sad.
These are placed in different schools and students are encouraged to place information (what makes them happy in the happy part and serious challenges bothering them in the dark compartment of the boxes) Information from these boxes are retrieved from time to time and used to identify current trends in youth and adolescent challenges. Key issues raised in the boxes are addressed by HDI advocates during the Assembly Talks which take place once or twice a week or during Counseling Days depending on the school. Victims of serious reproductive health and rights abuse and other challenges are encouraged to visit HDI for psycho-social counseling and other necessary intervention as the case may be.
HD’s happy and sad boxes are currently in more than 30 schools scattered all over Lagos Metropolis.
HDI usually organises media advocacy Workshop for Mass Communication Students of Tertiary Institutions in Lagos State. This programme is aimed at building the interests of the students in reproductive health and rights reporting having chosen career pathways in the media. The program allows for building partnership with the respective institutions through developing potential media advocacy programs with youth input.
Human Development Initiatives (HDI) offers telephone services together with other outreach services, to provide children in Nigeria the opportunity to make phone calls to the helpline in order to seek for help during emergencies or moments of crisis.
Over the years, HDI Child helpline has succeeded in improving the Reproductive Health of adolescents through counseling, mentoring and referrals as the case may require.
A mobile phone number was introduced and dedicated to serve this purpose. This number is 0808-055-1376, which has been widely publicised to create awareness.
