Tijani Mahmoud
My organisation was formed at a time when there a total ban in the Muslim communities on family planning. I started as a volunteer in the communities introducing the issues of rep[productive health to the youth and women in the community. Through the work with R3M partners led by Willows International, we implemented a series of projects that tackled the misunderstanding of the community towards family planning and also led an intervention that helped women in need to access quality family planning information and services to their satisfaction. this led to an increase in the contraceptive prevalence rate from a lower than average of 5.5% to over 32% in our target communities over a period of four years.
My passion for family planning was sparked after attending a training on reproductive health and family planning. After that training, I came to understand that more women in the communities who have the need family planning are being prevented from accessing family planning services due to misconception and misquoted religious scriptures. I saw the need to join the call to help 1000s of women who have to resort to dangerous means to satisfy the reproductive and family planning objectives.
I showed leadership by organizing the group of attendees to the workshop into an organised group with the objective to reaching the women and young people in the communities with the information that we received from the training to assist them fulfill their reproductive health needs. I also led the group to seek support and sponsorship for our programmes and we successfully attracted some limited funding for some of our programmes.
If named a winner, I would use the grant to reach the leadership especially the religious leaders through training them on reproductive health and family planning so as to get them to understand what family planning is all about and also be agents of spreading the information through their pulpits and other social gatherings
, 
, 
