CHANGEMAKER

CHANGEMAKER treats adolescence as a period when health, environment and behaviour are still being formed rather than waiting for chronic disease to appear in adulthood. Rapid urbanization changes what young people eat, how they move, the spaces available for physical activity and the environmental pressures around them. Those influences interact, making adolescent NCD prevention more than a question of individual knowledge.

The multinational programme works with adolescents and communities in urban Burkina Faso, Kenya and Tanzania to co-design and evaluate sustainable approaches to preventing obesity and other non-communicable diseases. In Tanzania, the programme is built around public secondary schools in Dar es Salaam and combines school, community and wider environmental perspectives.

CHANGEMAKER is deliberately multi-component. Urban farming and composting, classroom learning, motivational-interviewing health talks and mass-media activities are designed to work together rather than as unrelated health messages. The programme studies both health and nutrition outcomes and the implementation conditions that determine whether the package is adopted, delivered and sustained. Its central proposition is that prevention is stronger when young people help shape the intervention and when schools, families, communities and other sectors participate in changing the environment around adolescent health.

Its distinctive contribution is to test prevention as a combination of environmental, educational and behavioural change rather than reducing adolescent NCD risk to individual motivation alone.