How is UNESCO narrowing the gap to achieve youth-friendly health services

Delivery of youth friendly health services to young people is a vital weapon for preventing major nightmares troubling young people’s health (unintended pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, gender-based violence and sexual harassment). UNESCO, through the Our Rights Our Lives Our Future (O3 Plus) project continues to champion students’ health and well-being by strengthening feedback mechanisms to enable the management of respective health facilities to receive feedback from clients on the quality of service delivery.

To assure this, lately, the project has brought together key partners (Ministry of Education Science and Technology, Ministry of Health, TACAIDS, NATCOM, Health system management specialist, 7 Universities, and student representatives) in Morogoro for a capacity-building workshop to improve management of student’s health service scorecards.

A health service scorecard is a mechanism that provides students with an opportunity to give feedback on health services offered to them while helping health management to evaluate and improve service delivery according to the standards set. The tool also helps to inform the resources used and the results obtained, take informed decisions on future initiatives, and promote engagement of beneficiaries.

“Scorecards inform us more about an overview of performance and measure service delivery according to established standards” - Mr. Gerald Kihwele, National Coordinator Gender & Adolescent Health, Ministry of Health

To date, 5 higher learning Institutions (The University of Dar es Salaam Mlimani Campus, Dar es Salaam University College of Education, Mkwawa University College of Education, Mbeya College of Health and Allied Sciences, and the University of Dodoma) have introduced students’ health service scorecards to measure the overall quality of health service provided on their corresponding campuses.

O3 Plus project contributes directly to the health, education, and gender Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the specific targets for these, while also contributing to the achievement of other key SDGs, especially those related to poverty, hunger, peaceful and just societies.