Positivo Moçambique is an association of artists and activists using music in a truly unique participatory approach, for raising awareness about Health and Social matters and promoting positive learning opportunities to young people from the remote areas of Mozambique and other neighboring countries in Southern Africa.
When you come to a Positivo music workshop, you see the creative and participatory process up close. The young artists are asked to write creative poems on health subjects relevant to them. Then we have question and answer sessions with community nurses from the local health clinics. With the new information the young artist revise their poems and included positive messages within the lyrics. You will see them learning and practicing arts and culture in the schools. You will see Positivo elicit ideas from the participants relating to living positively and HIV testing during song writing workshops. These ideas become lyrics in the songs that the children will go on to ultimately record. You can see young students that have never done any kind of art, recording in our mobile studio energetic and enthusiastic songs.
In this program we create an opportunity for emerging young artists to present their song/message to their community in half hour youth shows. We undertake Peer to Peer education and affirmation of the message. In a severely isolated school we visited, only 38% of learners had tested for HIV. A large proportion of the younger learners were not sure if HIV exists. The participants of our program produced and performed lyrics which encouraged the community to face the problem of HIV together. With the help of community radio and mobile phone music transferring technology, a large number of the students and the community improved their health knowledge and went to be tested, some of them even singing the songs at the clinic.
The music workshop structure/methodology is a series of interventions with the target group and the participants. We write and record songs written by the participants with positive messages about HIV/AIDS. It starts with an informal group meeting of around 40 students. We then lead into interactive data collection, anonymous questionnaires, educational sessions about HIV and song writing workshops. We finish with a final concert where the students perform the song to the rest of the school. The students also present their other art projects which they have been working on during the workshop, including paintings and videos. At the end the students receive certificates and they become members of Positivo.
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Positivo distributes the art results through the media with special focus on TV, radio and internet. We encourage our partners, especially the schools to create further opportunities for these groups to perform in other schools.
“I would like to see this group become a peer education group and visit other schools sharing their message with them.” Francinah Magoro, US Embassy, said after a visit to one of our workshops.
Our vision is to be able to expand this program, by training other artists to use our methodology in remote and isolated schools in Mozambique and Southern Africa. We would like to facilitate them to develop educative and entertaining events that can help spread the message of HIV/AIDS awareness and also with the hope of generating income to enable the economic sustainability of the new artist educators.