Break Free! Programme

The three main objectives of the programme are:

1. Strengthening SRHR of young people: This means providing young people with correct information about SRHR and ensuring they can make use of suitable facilities and healthcare services.
2. Promoting better decision-making and effective implementation of laws and policies that meet the needs of young people: The focus here is on creating awareness, political will, and civil society lobby and advocacy (L&A) capacity to more effectively engage with duty bearers and decision makers so that they develop, resource, and implement legislation and policies that respond to adolescents' needs.
3. Providing good and safe education for girls at risk of child marriage and teenage pregnancy: This effort is based on the fact that the longer a girl stays in school, the less likely she is to marry before age 18 and have children during her teenage years. Here too, the focus is on awareness creation, changing of social norms, and behaviour change by creating opportunities for girls and adolescents to claim their rights on quality and safe education.

To achieve these objectives, Break Free! implements several interventions in each country as well as at a regional level. These interventions are implemented by one or a combination of the consortium partners, and they vary in intensity, depending on the country's budget and focus. Interventions include:

• Social movement and network building for social norms change: The programme supports the creation of networks of advocates and the mobilisation of young people, CSOs, and religious or civic leaders and authorities. By joining forces, it is believed that the programme can lobby more effectively on a larger scale, from local to international level. Young people and CSOs are, for example, trained by Break Free! on topics such as SRHR rights and gender equality, L&A skills, policy, legislative processes, and accountability mechanisms.
• Lobbying and information campaigns: Young people share information with their peers and youth in their community, and group members advocate with local and district duty bearers and governments for improved inclusive education and better SRHR services for adolescents. The young people themselves indicate what they want to campaign about and what their needs are. Examples include L&A activities towards new or adjusted regional commitments, laws, and policies at national, provincial, district, and community (by-laws) levels concerning quality and safe education and adolescent SRHR, including their harmonisation, implementation, and budget allocation. Contextual changes are taken into account. For example, L&A in Burkina Faso first strived for a law change by 2025 at the national level through which the legal age of marriage would be set at 18 years in the country. Due to a military coup, this initiative had to be replaced by a focus on the provincial/community level to have policies in place towards avoiding marriage below the age of 18.
• Access to policymakers: Through the creation of platforms and opportunities, the programme puts young people and CSOs in direct contact with policymakers and agencies at local, national, and international levels, including the Regional Economic Communities and the African Union.
• SRHR information provision to adolescents and (in selected countries) linkage of adolescents to SRH services: This work is done through various channels. In Burkina Faso, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, and Zambia, it is done through YouthWyze, an online platform and mobile app designed to empower and support adolescents and youth in navigating SRHR.
• School- and community-based interventions to improve education for young girls: Activities here include setting standards for the training of teachers, as well as training teachers in child protection at schools, advocacy for the support of the implementation of gender-responsive education principles, and community-based interventions to promote girls' education, quality and safe education, and child protection.
• Research into SRHR-related issues: KIT works together with the consortium and in-country experts to conduct research about young people's SRHR, the results of which serve as supporting material for lobbying and information campaigns and actions. The research involves desk studies and qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods studies, most of which involve young people during different parts of the research. Studies are conducted to understand young people's SRHR needs, access to education and SRHR information, and their role in advocacy, and the findings are used for L&A towards governments and donors. KIT also supports the programme's Planning, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (PMEL). Click here to find out more about some of the studies undertaken by KIT under Break Free!
• Facilitating the exchange of knowledge: The programme also seeks to increase impact by exchanging knowledge with the various organisations.

Across programme activities, the active involvement of girls and boys, young women and men is a key component of Break Free!, with the consortium fully committed to the principle of meaningful and inclusive youth participation (MIYP).

As explained in the Break Free! Narrative Report 2021 [PDF, May 2022], "Adolescents and youth across West, East and Southern Africa face considerable challenges in their health, education, and employment, due to early marriage, early and unintended pregnancies, and female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C). Adolescent girls are particularly vulnerable to these issues. The West African region has one of the highest early marriage rates globally, and the largest percentage of women who reported a birth before the age of 15 and 18 years. In East and Southern Africa, early marriage rates are also high, often linked to the also high rates of early and unintended pregnancies. Access to education, information and services to improve young people's SRHR remains limited, additionally hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as conflict that negatively impacts social services for young people. As such, improved legal frameworks, policies, and strategies are needed to adequately meet the SRH and education needs and rights of adolescents and young people in West, East, and Southern Africa."

Results of the Break Free! Mid-Term Review Synthesis Report [(MTR), November 2023] reveal that, halfway into the 5-year programme, the programme has reached 176,000 young people with information about healthy and equal relationships and preventing unwanted pregnancies. As a result, more and more young people are looking for information about sexual health and family planning and resources such as sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing and contraception. It also showed that numerous and significant changes and challenges in the political, social, and economic context in the region have affected the first half of the Break Free! programme in the eight countries included in the review. Nevertheless, good progress has been made in getting and keeping girls in school, in relation to the development of new and or improved commitments, laws, policies, strategies, and bylaws, as well as in relation to the implementation of SRHR and education commitments and policies in the countries and at the regional level. Access to SRHR information and services for young people has also substantially been improved, as has the application of MIYP.

The MTR showed that due to the fragile political and social context in some countries (2023 in particular, saw major escalations in the situation in three of the Break Free! implementation countries: Sudan, Niger, and Ethiopia), national-level lobbying and advocacy is only possible at a very limited level. As such, lobbying and advocacy activities have focused more on sub-national levels in some countries where more flexibility exists and where there is more scope to make changes, such as improving implementation of existing policies. These efforts need to be strengthened and scaled up where possible.