Peer-led clubs to replace fear and shame with facts

A full 12-month plan. A $7,000 budget for 15 schools. Training materials ready. Umukundwa Yvette, a student in Kigali, has all of that for "My Life, My Dignity", the project she is building. What she has not yet run is the first club.

The project creates student led clubs in secondary and primary schools to teach sexual reproduction, consent, and refusal skills. The goal, she says, is to end early pregnancy "by replacing fear and shame with facts and dignity." Each Dignity Club would have 20 peer leaders, with boys and girls together. "Boys need to know what consent is. Girls need to know their bodies. Everyone needs to know how pregnancy happens and how to prevent it."

“Paper and permission but not yet action.”

Umukundwa Yvette

She has talked to three school principals. Two said yes immediately, she says, and one asked for time to think. So she also made a plan for a parent preview night. "No surprises. Just biology and dignity."

Why she cares: last year, she says, a girl she knew, 14 years old, got pregnant. The girl did not know how pregnancy happens, and no one had ever told her she could say no. She dropped out. "That's not her fault," she says. "I don't want another girl to lose her future because we were too scared to talk."

"I am a student. I am not a doctor or a teacher. But I saw what happens when adults stay silent," she says. She does not have a nonprofit or a website. What she has, she says, is a notebook and "a lot of anger at a world that lets 14-year-olds become mothers alone."

She wants to start with one school and prove it works, then take the results to funders and, eventually, to all 15 schools.