We commit to raising health literacy and peace-building capacity among students of Ahfad University. This should serve a multi-faceted purpose of empowering women, promoting health literacy, and promoting peace culture through the ethnically diverse population of Ahfad that hails from all communities in Sudan.

Goals

Through extensive workshops targeting students, we hope to increase peace-building capacity combined with promotion of health literacy. Additionally, we hope to integrate peace building training among students on campus as a pilot project. Ahfad University students have proven very active in the fields of health literacy, womens empowerment, poverty alleviation, human rights & peace, and thus we aim to support their efforts and projects at IDP camps, underdeveloped regions, rural areas and advance health education initiatives by providing appropriate knowledge and building essential skills. The main health issues that we will target include FGM, maternal and child health, infectious disease, and introduce conflict as a public health problem. The special situation of Sudan merits the broad scope of the health problems we aim to tackle and it is a reflection of the main health challenges facing developing African nations. This undertaking, upon successful completion, should serve as a template for similar projects to be carried out across Sudanese, and subsequently, African university campuses.

Plan

The initial target population for the training is the Ahfad student population who are meant to travel on rural extension trips and rural health trips, which are compulsory requirements for graduation from the university. The training will enhance the ability of the students to carry out the expanded objective for which we are aiming. The diversity of the student population serves as an asset that will ease communication and allows for proper geographic distribution. Furthermore, the student body has individuals who speak most, if not all, local dialects in Sudan which should allow the adaptation of material to best suit the local environments. The approximate group targeted for health literacy training is 500 students.



The peace building component will require more extensive training which necessitates the reduction of this number to around 100, divided into four groups of 25. These students will first have to be empowered as young women through self-esteem workshops, debate skills and communication skills in order to enable them to find their voice, to defend their rights to health and livelihood, and to promote their role as active agents within a peace system. The second phase will include training to increase their knowledge base about conflict indicators, concepts of ethnicity, and peaceful co-existence. As Sudan is currently at a critical point as a nation, any effort to promote a healthy society must include peace-building and peace-maintenance components.



The health promotion component can be carried out by certified trainers from Ahfad Medical Students Association (AMSA), because we believe that peer-education is more effective in relaying information to students through youth who can speak in their voice. The peace-building component should be implemented by experts who will be invited to volunteer their knowledge and experiences. Some Ahfad staff members have already expressed interest in participating and guiding this effort. We most certainly welcome any international experts who wish to support the initiative through volunteering their expertise in capacity building, training, funding and/or their much appreciated time.



Future prospects for the dissemination of this initiative are promising because of the built-in networking capacity of the AMSA with other universities across Sudan. Potentially, through the network, we will have an outstanding base of human resources of motivated medical students, already working towards goals concerning health education, affairs of refugees and issues of public health. Through further training for these students, we can reach a broader spectrum of students at other universities across the country, empowering even more students to have an impact on issues of concern by provision of accurate information and increasing the capacity for health education, health debates and peace building.