In 2017, UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE) together with Nowchpok channel released 11 edutainment videos for adolescents and young people. These short animated videos cover different aspects of adolescent’s life from forming gender culture to building relationships and mitigating conflicts, from prevention of violence to prevention of HIV and substance use, from sexuality to reproductive health. Within less than a year, the videos got total 8.5 million views at Nowchpok channel on Youtube.
These videos have first been developed in Russian language, and then tested with focus groups of adolescents and healthy lifestyle teachers to get their feedback on the content relevance, language and presentation format. After that, the videos have been localized to be used in several countries such as Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus. The localization was based on the feedback and recommendations from the focus groups in order to match the socio-cultural contexts of different countries and their healthy lifestyle school curriculum.
All together, there are now 30 videos and 3 manuals available in three different languages to support health educators in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus to deliver more interactive and interesting healthy lifestyle lessons using demonstration and discussion of videos.
This initiative was carried out with the support from UNAIDS regional technical cooperation program for HIV prevention in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Ministries of Education of Belarus and Kyrgyzstan have already recommended these videos for using during healthy lifestyle lessons in secondary school and issued relevant instruction letters to local education departments and schools.
TigranYepoyan, UNESCO regional advisor on HIV and health education says:
“Healthy lifestyle lessons will be effective and popular if only they are performed by an experienced and well-trained teacher in an engaging and interactive format. The videos we produced together with Nowchpok provide scientifically correct information in a culturally appropriate manner. They are age-specific and help teachers to talk openly with 14-16 year old girls and boys about the most sensitive issues. We are pleased to see that teachers and pupils themselves like these videos. 8.5 million views prove that. We are committed to further help teachers to deliver good quality health education and maintain this important conversation with adolescents about relationships, health and wellbeing”.
UNESCO IITE and Nowchpok videos are available in Russian, Armenian and Kyrgyz languages at UNESCO IITE Youtube channel