In 2012 I travelled to Colombia for the first time. I witnessed a fiercely worrying number of girls with their babies on the hip walking along the roads between cars and trucks selling candy, coffee, or soda. The girls were trying to earn a few pesos for baby food and diapers, and these jobs were – without any doubt – very dangerous. I was struck right in the heart by knowing that these girls were supposed to sit on the school bench and be educated – not walk around poor and vulnerable in unsafe streets. These girls had dropped out of school and were painfully aware that their prospects were poverty and dangerous jobs.

I knew I had to do something serious about this huge problem. Children are not supposed to give birth to children! These poor girls must look into a future with education and control over their own fertility, instead of teenage pregnancies, school drop-outs, and dangerous jobs. I started to build a network of skilled local children professionals. Together, we discussed how an innovative sexual education could help both girls and boys with tools and knowledge about the body, contraception, and gender equality in sexual relations.

Colombia’s 52 years of the extremely violent civil war was a huge obstacle to take the first steps of organizing our new project in the country, but when the peace process became a reality in 2016 led by president Juan Manuel Santos, I was prepared to take the next step.

With my experience with creating coherent projects and tools for children and adolescents, professionals, and parents, and with my Colombian colleagues’ various professional experiences and insights, we started to believe that with joint help and close cooperation, we were capable of reducing teenage pregnancies drastically. Our mission from this day on was to replace Colombian girls’ unsafe future with education, hopes, and dreams.

By 2017, we had a competent team of psychologists from Bogotá, and together, we started working on a comprehensive education in sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). This education had to be bullet-proof to secure that the girls don’t get pregnant but stay in school. Our goal was also to motivate boys to take sexual responsibility and use contraception.

We started our preliminary studies mapping out social, economic, and political determinant factors and contexts, including the extreme male chauvinistic culture “machismo” with traditional gender roles, gender inequality and sexual violence.

We designed a pilot project, and over the next three years, we held a lot of workshops for girls and boys in schools and orphanages. We interviewed teenage mothers and listened to their stories about how they became pregnant at the age of 13-14 without having any concept or knowledge about sex, female biology, and contraception. They were easy prey for older boys and men who wanted casual sex without contraception.

We developed an education for boys to become gender equality transformers and support girls in schools and the local community. We investigated how we could build safe spaces and networks for the girls in their neighborhood with experienced and resourceful women as mentors and advisors.

We tested our efforts that draw on relevant best practice methodologies from Denmark. We adapted these efforts to girls and boys in Colombia and the cultural diversity at schools, orphanages, and other children’s institutions where we received great feedback.

We evaluated the efforts and uncovered interesting findings and significant moments of change in the target groups, which generated content for our future workshops and digital communication tools. We established a new NGO that we decided to call Hogar de Esperanza.

With solid experience from my Danish projects and methodologies adjusted to Colombian contexts, we have developed a coherent and sustainable effort focusing on qualified teaching.

Today, we offer 4 coherent projects, which provide solid potential to help young girls and boys in Colombia through greater awareness about their sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and gender equality in sexual relations and everyday life.

We offer workshops for girls and boys – together and separately. We have a teach-the-teachers program for children professionals and we are currently developing digital communication tools for children and professionals with a universe of content about sex, sexuality, contraception, consent, right to your own body, and other important topics. The digital universe creates awareness, reflection, and motivates to make healthy and responsible choices in sexual relations.

Last but not least, we are making partnerships all over Colombia to spread our activities across the nation and to do capacity building and advocacy for our efforts and methods.

You can read more about our projects here.