This Toolkit is intended to guide humanitarian programme managers and healthcare providers to ensure that sexual and reproductive health interventions put into place both during and after a crisis are responsive to the unique needs of adolescents.
It provides user-friendly tools for assessing the impact of a crisis on adolescents, implementing an adolescent-friendly Minimum Initial Service Package , and ensuring that adolescents can participate in the development and implementation of humanitarian programmes. Other tools are specifically designed for healthcare providers to help them be more effective in providing and tracking services for adolescents at the clinic and community levels.
The Toolkit was created by Save the Children and UNFPA, under the guidance of a Technical Advisory Group comprised of UNICEF, UNHCR, Women’s Refugee Commission, IRC, RAISE, Pathfinder International, JSI, CDC and Columbia University.
The ASRH Toolkit for Humanitarian Settings provides information and guidance to advocate for ASRH and implement adolescent-inclusive SRH interventions. The toolkit is meant to accompany Chapter 4 “Adolescent Reproductive Health” of the Inter-Agency Field Manual on Reproductive Health in humanitarian settings, IAFM. The tools have been conceived to operationalize this chapter by providing guidance on what should be done to ensure that sexual and reproductive health interventions put into place during and immediately after a crisis are responsive to the needs of adolescents.
While the best way to ensure that ASRH needs are met is to mainstream ASRH into the emergency RH response, mainstreaming is a process that requires planning and coordination and often implementing agencies do not have the time, resources or capacity to do this during an acute emergency.
Recognizing that mainstreaming approaches to mainstreaming ASRH in emergencies have not yet been standardized, this ASRH Toolkit has been designed to help program managers at implementing agencies ensure that the sexual and reproductive health needs of adolescents are addressed during all emergency situations, be they natural or man-made. It also provides selected tools specifically for health providers so they can more effectively provide and track services for adolescents at the clinic and community levels.
The tools are designed to be user-friendly so that service providers who have never been trained to work with adolescents can feel comfortable treating them during an emergency. Each humanitarian situation is unique, and it is expected that the tools will be adapted to suit the particular needs on the ground. It is also expected that the Toolkit will be used to raise awareness about the SRH needs of adolescents and as an initial step of mainstreaming ASRH into emergency RH responses.
You can download this toolkit for free here.
