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Last August 27-28, 2024, Government Watch (G-Watch), together with its local core team and the Local Development Youth Office (LYDO), conducted a workshop on how to effectively monitor adolescent health programs in Dumaguete. This was a follow-up activity after a successful problem-solving session done earlier in March when the Dumaguete LYDO expressed interest to improve delivering relevant health services to their young constituents in response to heightened concerns over mental health, teenage pregnancy, increase in HIV/STI cases, and challenges in promoting health-seeking behavior. In the event, G-Watch and Dumaguete LYDO launched a monitoring tool that can be used to check how youth-centered and effective are adolescent health programs.
Representatives from the City Health Office of Dumaguete (CHO), the Commission of Population and Development (CPD), Foundation University, and the LYDO, with youth organizations part of the Local Youth Development Council (LYDC), were invited to share their adolescent health programs, challenges and best practices.
Ms. Marichu Banjao shared how the Dumaguete CHO handles adolescent health concerns through their Social Hygiene Clinic, maternal care services, referrals, and advocacy campaigns to manage and prevent mental health concerns. They regularly coordinate with other offices, and consistently perform as reflected in their Smoke-Free Hall of Fame and Healthy Pilipinas Awards. The CPD, according to Ms. Babygirl Sumoray, mainly conducts talks and engagements with students, parents, and teens, especially through their Ladderized Education Training (LPET) Program, and Basic Course Training on Adolescent Health and Development (AHDP) Program with the Dumaguete Youth Leaders for Development (DYLD). Other stakeholders such as the academe–represented by Foundation University’s Mr. Mick Cornelia–also shared how they handle adolescent health in the context of private academic institutions through the availability of medical services, counseling, accident insurance claims, and dental check-ups for their students in-campus.
Challenges continue to persist, especially in maintaining the interest of young people. Moreover, ensuring that the right participants are involved—such as youth at higher risks of early pregnancies, and STIs. Participants shared how the absence of incentives such as snacks can deter participation. Also, tight funding and resources limit the design of such activities to talks, forums, and camps–leaving little room to consider longer and more physically-engaging activities.
LYDO as TPA Champions of Dumaguete
The Local Development Office of Dumaguete, through the presentation of Mr. Tigie Tanilon, is proud to claim transparency, participation, and accountability (TPA) as their core element in ensuring a strong multi-sectoral approach to serve the youth. Most of the programs headed by the other offices are in partnership and collaboration with the LYDO, besides other activities such as training on self-defense for women, and raising awareness on music therapy for mental health. Participants from the LPET and Training for AHDP led to significant gains in nurturing confidence among participants to later take on leadership and facilitative roles in the succeeding iterations of these programs. Since 2019, about 2,050 participants and 179 youth leaders have been trained to become peer educators.
Most especially, the LYDO has since tapped local youth organizations as part of the LYDC–21 organizations are voting members from the more than 40 youth-led and youth-serving organizations in Dumaguete. Within the LYDO, they maintain transparency and a powerful system of reporting and gathering feedback through establishing their own citizen’s charter, maximizing their social media, and monitoring the performance of Sangguniang Kabataan (SKs or Youth Councils) in all barangays. They take initiative in publishing their accomplishment reports for review and comments and have been at the helm of passing significant policies such as the Youth Welfare and Development Code, Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Ordinance, and the institutionalization of the LYDO. These efforts have brought in recognition from the City Government of Dumaguete as the Top 1 Best Implementing Office, and Outstanding LYDO in Negros Oriental, aside from the Department of Education (DepEd) Dumaguete, the Philippine National Police (PNP) Dumaguete, SKs, the Department of Health (DOH) and the National Nutrition Council (NNC).
Such strong alignment with G-Watch’s advocacy has led to positive developments in pushing for preemptive and intuitive approaches to improve services, particularly through workshop and monitoring.
Assessing Adolescent Health Programs
A workshop consolidated inputs from the presentations on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the adolescent programs, what needs to be monitored/assessed more closely, and suggestions in enabling youth-led accountability in adolescent health programs. Three groups presented and reiterated existing problems on maintaining young people engaged in activities and limited budget, in addition to challenges in assessing the impact of youth services and events. The government offices present in the workshop expressed strong collaboration among themselves, as well as openness in engaging with other stakeholders. However, they still feel the need to maintain the relevance and appropriateness of their content while having a more targeted approach for vulnerable youth groups.
Ms. Joy Aceron of G-Watch synthesized what was shared and presented a map of how different actors are involved in adolescent health in Dumaguete as a way to map accountability and seek areas of convergence among them. To respond to the issues on attendance, she reiterated how it’s hard to track what one young individual benefits or gains from activities. “You should look at it as a reality–but also try to view it as a collective. Eventually, mayroon talagang mag-este-step-up (Eventually, there will be someone who will step up,” she shares. She emphasized this point especially for the LYDO to pay more attention to the approach of their adolescent programs–be it for educational purposes (i.e., making them aware of their rights), or capacity-building. That way, their assessment would be more in tune with whether they were able to properly disseminate information, or create an enabling environment for youth participation.
She added that the rationale behind the monitoring of adolescent health services is to at least clarify what can be accessed by the youth according to national standards. Furthermore, it will become an addition to G-Watch’s examination on what constitutes a “youth-led” monitoring, to “...acknowledge their potential and let them own it.”
Ms. Faith Santos from G-Watch then presented the draft of the monitoring tool for review. Based on national health policies, standards on facilities, personnel, health services for reproductive, nutrition, and mental health, health education and promotion, and TPA mechanisms were modeled through a simple checklist. Participants shared that there should be items pertaining to standards on confidentiality, fun and action-oriented activities, as well as the presence of feedback mechanisms from both facilities/offices to be checked and the LYDO/LYDC. These were added and confirmed by the participants for a final version containing a total of 43 standards for adolescent services. Through the conduct of monitoring, the participants and facilitators hope that this will help gauge the level of friendliness and centeredness of these services towards the youth, viewing them as part of the decision-making process rather than simply as beneficiaries.
The three volunteer groups will decide whether they will check a particular unit or activity to monitor in the next months. They are set to finish their monitoring from October-November 2024.
(Photos credits: G-Watch and LYDO. See here for more.)