BRIDGING GENERATIONAL GAP IN MENTAL HEALTH

Permit me to share some information with you from the Gabi Williams Alzheimer's Foundation – The 2022 GWAF Mental Heath School Awareness Program: "Old School Hip-Hop" held 2021/22 academic session in pre selected schools across Lagos State ended successfully. The intervention has been a regular feature of our yearly advocacy and awareness activities, since 2019 and has since reached thousands of school age children of diverse background and social strata.

The intervention is an upscale a domesticated component adapted from the Hip Hop Old School Public Health, USA. The program is targeted at School age children (8-15 years) in Lagos State with coverage limited to 8 Local Government Areas/LCDA, for this 2022 round.  The intervention aimed at demystifying dementia, creating awareness on Alzheimer’s disease and reduces its related stigma and bridging generational gap in information on the disease, targeting younger generation in Schools.

Specific Objectives:

• To amplify the importance of Mental Health among school age children
• To promote risk factors reduction and prevention of Dementia among school children
• To introduce attendees to the importance of healthy living, diet and healthy nutrition
• To influence children’s attitude towards the aged and reduce stigma against the aged specifically. people living with Dementia
• To institutionalize care and love for the senior citizens and aged in their community.
• To use the children as vanguard and agent of social change in the care for the aged.

A total number of 1,299 persons were reached through the project. This was made of 94 teachers and 1, 205 Students and Pupils in pre selected private Schools across Lagos. 

3 of our resource materials were used with cognizance on the average age bracket of beneficiaries (Pupil/Student)

Material Title & Average Age Bracket

Old School Hip Hop Comic Book – Upper Primary Pupils (Ages 8-10)

Is Alzheimer’s A Normal Part of Ageing? -Junior Secondary Section (Ages 11-13)

Introduction to Alzheimer’s Disease–Senior Secondary Section (Ages14+ and staff)

These materials were complemented with our animated audio visual: ‘Wetin Dey Do Mama Dupe? The project team was made of 5 staff (Lekan, Kate and Alice and transport manager, Abubakar) with, Mr. Peter, Senior Officer, GWAF, who anchored each session with a short power point presentation culled from the materials. The program was warmly welcome by the participating schools and the interest of the teachers was also high. This was deduced from the various comments in the post-event comment section of the questionnaire.

Here are the names of Schools visited with population

Summary of population reached

No of Schools reached- 10 Schools
No of Students/Pupils reached-1, 205
No of Teachers reached- 94

Total reached- 1,299 persons

Below is the graphical illustration of population reached during the 2022 event

From the above, X indicates the figures of population and Y indicates the name of the schools. Series 2 represents the population of students/pupils reached in each School while series 3 represents the population of staff reached in the same school.