By Madeleine Bolliger | Project Officer
Dear project supporter,
Our experience working with youth in Windhoek strongly indicates that substance abuse by teenagers is increasing in Namibia. However, the absence of valid and reliable data in this specific field makes it difficult to justify interventions and to develop adequate programmes. This is why the International Blue Cross, together with the Government of Finland, decided to finance a national research project on adolescent substance use.
Under the lead of the Namibian Ministry of Health the “European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs” (ESPAD) was, for the first time, adapted to a non-European context. The most important objective of this research programme was to collect comparable data on substance abuse among 15-16 year old students in order to monitor trends and to compare data between countries. Under the first “African School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs” (ASPAD) ever, the Namibian Ministry of Health, with support from Finnish ESPAD experts, was able to train its regional social workers and gather 6200 questionnaires from all regions of the country. It is expected that the results of the first “African School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs” (ASPAD) will be published in early 2015.
The outcome of the survey will feed into the national alcohol policy process while at the same time helping to design new prevention strategies based on current realities. The Blue Cross is implementing organization with a mandate that goes beyond promoting good policies: we want to help the countries to practicallyimplement these policies. And this is what Blue Cross Namibia does with its School Awareness Creation Project (SACP). ASPAD will help SACP to sharpen its understanding of addiction and its root causes. It will help the programme to increase the efficiency of its interventions, and last but not least, it will help us to look beyond the capital city to design future strategies for the implementation of school awareness campaigns in other areas of the country, that are especially affected by teenage substance abuse.
The Blue Cross of Namibia and the International Blue Cross would like to seize this opportunity to wish you a Merry Christmas and all the best for a healthy New Year! A warm thank you for the support which you have extended to the students of Windhoek high schools during the past year.
Kind regards,
Madeleine Bolliger, Project Officer
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can recieve an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
