Publications, Events, Abstracts, and Presentations
The AmbassADDOrs for Health study will be releasing new publications and presentations as the study continues. Here are some key highlight findings from our pilot study:
- In our design research, we found that young women were often surrounded by gatekeepers who all felt a common moral imperative to policy young women’s movements, especially when it came to seeking SRH care.
- To overcome this challenge, we intended for Malkia Klabu to be perceived as an exclusive and private club for AGYW rather than more generally creating broad awareness. We hypothesized that AGYW would be both more receptive to a specialized program and invite their peers.
- And we found strong evidence that social norms among AGYW helped fuel awareness of Malkia Klabu, mainly spread by word of mouth. Many AGYW participants influenced their sisters, friends, and neighbors to join Malkia Klabu, with some showing off their club cards or prizes as validation of the benefits.
- To increase the saliency of SRH products while shopping, we designed an open, bright pink display with sample SRH products and accessible information cards for hands-on learning.
- With few trusted sources to turn to, AGYW have limited knowledge of contraception, and many questions and misconceptions. We hypothesized that having informational videos about contraceptive methods featuring age peer narrators could enhance the perceived credibility of the information being conveyed, harnessing the influence of messengers.
- Although few girl respondents referenced the person in the videos explicitly, we have some evidence that the information conveyed was slightly more notable to AGYW viewers. And this may be emblematic of the messenger strategy having a more unconscious influence that participants may not have been aware of.
- By offering free HIVST and prizes, intervention shopkeepers not only saw more customers and distributed more contraceptives, but also greater revenue from AGYWs’ shop purchases and purchases of HIVST kits by non-AGYW