dance4life

schools4life Pakistan

Rutgers WPF Pakistan along with its four implementing partner organizations have taken the initiative to raising awareness among young people and enable them to make safe and healthy decisions in life. This would contribute towards improving young people’s sexual reproductive health and rights status; improving their access to life skills based education; and improving access to youth friendly services.

dance4life international

schools4life is an initiative under dance4life international. Dance4life is a dynamic international initiative which actively involves young people and gives them a powerful voice in pushing back the spread of HIV and the stigma and taboos that surround it by promoting life skills based education. Young people are inspired through the use of experience marketing, dance, music, youth icons and their own language, encouraging them to learn more about life skills, HIV and AIDS, and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR).

Between now and 2014, dance4life aims to have created one million ‘agents of change’ around the world by actively involving large numbers of young people every year in in-depth life skills programmes and other prevention, awareness and fundraising activities.

Up until the end of 2010 over 900,000 young people had been reached in 28 countries through dance4life with 375,000 of these having gone on to become agents of change.

Objective of the schools4life Pakistan:

  1. to educate and aware young people about life skills crucial to make safe and informed choices regarding their sexual and reproductive health and rights
  2. to empower young people with skills, motivation, and support to promote healthy life styles among their peers and communities
  3. to engage young people in sharing responsibilities in all aspects of d4l program and taking a lead role in promoting life skills in their communities and thus creating a pool of young activists to join dance4life global youth movement.

The Concept:

The schools4life programme consists of four steps: inspire, educate, activate and celebrate. Overall dance4life is about becoming an agent 4change, so that you can mobilize others for social change. Then you can convince and involve your peers.

  1. Inspire
    Our local tour teams, including people living with HIV, travel to participating schools to INSPIRE young people with music, drums, dancing, and with their peers, talking about HIV in an open way
  2. Educate
    After inspiring, we EDUCATE young people with a focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights and HIV and AIDS.
  3. Activate
    Equipped with these empowering skills, young people can now go forward, take action and make a positive change in their community. These young people are the AGENTS4CHANGE.
  4. Celebrate
    As a CELEBRATION, a powerful global dance event is organised every2 years on the Saturday before World AIDS Day. Only agents4change can attend. United by one cause and connected live via satellite they dance together to inspire and gain support from the rest of the world, and to remind the world leaders of the promises they made regarding the Millennium Development Goals.

Our target group:

School youth between the age of 13 and 19 year in the four programme districts will be targeted for the dance4life campaign because:

  • Young people are part of the solution
  • Young people are most vulnerable to sexual and gender based violence
  • Young people are more receptive at this age
  • Young people are the future

Geographic Focus:

  • Lahore
  • Islamabad
  • Multan
  • Quetta

Partner Organizations:

  • Lahore: Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA)
  • Multan: Awaz Foundation Center for Development Services (Awaz CDS)
  • Quetta: Participatory Integrated development Society (PIDS)
  • Islamabad: Bedari