Pioneering youth club member creates “Youth can” App

Tekalegn Genene Abera, a pioneering youth innovator from the DSW-supported SERK Youth Empowerment Centre (YEC), created the YouthCan app, an innovative platform that revolutionises sexual and reproductive health (SRH) and family planning for young people by providing a wealth of information through engaging media such as podcasts and videos. Tekalegn’s visionary creation has become a beacon of knowledge and empowerment, transforming the lives of countless young people in his local community and beyond.

Tekalegn, 18, who lives with his mother in the town of Assela, approximately 150 kilometres south of the capital of Ethiopia, first became involved with the DSW-supported YEC when he was in middle school: “I was able to learn about DSW’s work on SRH issues and youth empowerment programmes through various materials such as newsletters that DSW regularly produced and distributed to our school through the SERK Youth Empowerment Centre. This is how I learnt about the Youth Empowerment Centre in school through the newsletters, which most of us liked to read from page to page at that time.” Tekalegn’s interest in the club and its valuable work for the community continued to grow, and two years later, he began his volunteer role as a peer-led group leader and peer educator at the centre, as well as becoming a focal person for DSW’s Voice for Choice project. Tekalegn recalls: “The more I got involved in the project, the more I imagined how my role could best contribute to the SRH needs of the youth.”

Sexual and reproductive health issues are still taboo in Ethiopia, which means that young people cannot turn to their parents for answers and support, so instead they turn to youth empowerment centres and clubs, or the internet if they are unable to attend one. Tekalegn soon realised that the young people who were not receiving SRH information from the centre were getting their information from their smartphones. There is a lot of SRH information on the internet, but if you look in the wrong place, you can find a lot of misinformation. Tekalegn also noticed that young people with physical disabilities were often unable to access the right SRH information and services for them at the YEC. Tekalegn came up with a solution to all of these problems that were evident in his community. He developed an app entitled “Youth Can”, which acts as a youth-friendly SRH information channel.

But Tekalegn didn’t just develop the app for his local community, he made the youth-friendly, Facebook-like app accessible to young people from many different communities in Ethiopia by not only making it primarily available in the widely spoken local languages, including Amharic and Afan Oromo, as well as English but also having the app support more than fifty foreign languages through the Google Translate feature. The app is free in an attempt to make it as accessible as possible.

The app serves as an exchange platform where young people can connect with each other and share their experiences. It also hosts live streams, podcasts, videos, virtual meetings and training sessions, to name but a few of its features. A very important feature of the app is its address book function, which allows young people to identify the locations of youth-friendly services in their area. Young people who share the app with their friends can also be rewarded – the more ‘invites’ you send out, the better your chances of being rewarded. For example, an Internet access package is the most common reward that motivates many young people to share the referral invitation.

Although money was far from the main motivation for creating the app, to improve young people’s access to youth-friendly information and services, Tekalegn does earn a small income from google ads on the platform. But he is not the only one! The app is also a source of income and promotion for others. Other young people involved in DSW-supported YECs use the app to promote their self-made products, such as reusable sanitary towels, to reach a wider audience.

The Youth Can app, developed by Tekalegn for DSW, has helped break down the barriers that prevent young people from accessing sexual and reproductive health and rights information and services.

Tekalegn is currently enrolled at St Mary’s University, where he has been awarded a scholarship to study software engineering. Tekalegn has ambitions to continue his education abroad. We look forward to seeing the great things that he will achieve in the future.

Interview with Tekalegn Genene Abera conducted by Esayas Gebre-Meskel (DSW Ethiopia)

Photos: © Brian Otieno/DSW