TRAINING!

As the holiday season is beyond us we have started a new year at Grassroot Soccer Port Elizabeth. So far the month of February has been the month of trainings. Three weeks ago we had a TOC-Training of Coaches. Grassroot Soccer uses coaches to deliver our curriculum directly to the kids in school, however all coaches are in a two year contract. So, every year we hire new coaches and they have a week of training. The training consists of a lot of fun energizers, kilos, and teachbacks-this occurs when the coaches learn the curriculum and then teach it back to the rest of the coaches.

Along with my Monitoring and Evaluation responsibilities, I have been appointed manager of one of our largest research projects within the organization: The GOAL Trial. The GOAL Trial is a Ph.D. project of a former GRS Intern who is now studying at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The purpose of the trial is to determine whether our Generation Skillz Curriculum (made for 9-12th grade students) is actually affecting behavior. The study is a longitudinal, RCT (Randomised Control Trial) that will last for three years. The baseline results were collected in 2012, so 2013 marks the second year of the study and my first year immersing myself in the research.

Originally, we wanted to collect Dried Blood Spots (small blood samples) to check the HIV status of our participants at the beginning of the study and then compare the numbers of negatives that turned positive over the three year span between the experimental group (receive Gen Skillz) and the control group (do not receive any HIV based curriculum). With the hope that the results would show that the Gen Skillz curriculum actually changed behavior and curbed the spread of HIV. Our goal was to test over 9,000 9^th grade students in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Port Elizabeth. Unfortunately the amount of participants that we were hoping for was cut in half when the Department of Health in Gauteng (where Johannesburg is located) believed that collecting blood from high school students was unethical. We were able to continue the study in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth and even moved another team of researchers to Port Elizabeth to collect the data.  However, our sample size is now too small to be confident enough to show that there is a difference between the two groups. Luckily, along with the blood samples we also administered a 170 item phone based survey for the kids that provided very useful information. The questions range from, “Do you have a television in your house?” to “Did you use a condom last time you engaged in sex”. We wanted to have a thorough understanding of our participants and knew it would be hard for the students to answer 170 questions, however doing it on the phone made it much more fun.

This year we will be going back to the 30 schools from last year to follow up with more questionnaires. The hard part this year is making sure that all the students that participated last year take part in the study again this year. It will be difficult tracing students that have dropped out of school, switched schools, or even moved to other cities. Two weeks back the PE site embraced the RCT from Cape Town and had a week long training together to make sure our teams are prepared for tracing students that may have been displaced or any hiccups that may occur when administering the surveys.

Now to the heavy stuff. We learned from the Goal Trial results last year some really interesting, heartbreaking statistics. One of the questions on the survey was, "Have you ever forced anyone to have sex with you that said no" or basically in less harsh terms...have you ever raped someone. Out of the 2,750 9th grade boys in the study 28% of them said that yes to the question and basically admitted that they had raped someone before. Another question targeted to the girls was if they had ever experienced IPV (intimate partner violence), aka being hit, slapped, punched, or beaten by their partner. About 30% of the participants or almost 1/3 said that they had. These statistics are heartbreaking, however are huge for us as an organization to know. So, this week the curriculum team from Cape Town has been here and have been teaching a new "booster" curriculum, a 6 course curriculum that will be given to kids who are now in 10th grade that participated in the study last year. The curriculum focuses in on this idea of violence and abuse in relationships with the hope that education will stop the injustices that are evident towards women. Honestly, it was very hard for me to hear and comprehend the gravity of the violence that goes on for kids in the community that I am living in, but also very important to truly understand what is going on.
This is more of a general overview of our trainings and this past week. If you have any more questions or comments I would love to talk more about our new curriculum. Just send me an email at matthus2008@gmail.com