Nia Teen Magazine

Leveraging the methodology of social and behavior change communications, we have created Nia Teen, which serves as a corresponding textbook for Nia Yetu, designed to improve the health, confidence and agency of adolescents across Kenya.

Our referable health magazine, Nia Teen celebrates real girls, highlights their heroes, and includes an innovative comic that walks alongside girls as they go through the joys and challenges of growing up.

Nia Teen is a comprehensive set of health magazines created by ZanaAfrica for adolescents. Rooted in our database of over 10,000 real questions from girls through our programs, each issue is designed and tested for measurable knowledge retention and behavior change. 

Nia Teen provides the information, guidance and affirmation adolescents seek and need to navigate puberty in a way that is referable and user-tested for behavior change and health outcomes. They are a physical resource that can be read in private, shared with others, and referred back to over time.

Topics include menstrual and reproductive health education through a rights-based lens, alongside activities to foster self-efficacy, and to support youth to safely and confidently navigate adolescence. An embedded comic within the magazine demonstrates healthy decision-making and has an accompanying discussion guide.

In a nutshell

We literally put answers in youths’ hands: a dynamic textbook in magazine format pairs with our curriculum, showcasing comics and stories of real people. This inherently makes them engaging to youth and acceptable to adults in their world. Embedded throughout is a narrative of transformation of power relations and girls’ choice and voice to enable all youth to actualize their own choice and voice, delivering sustainable, significant, measurable change in gender norms and reproductive health knowledge and access. By modeling positive masculinity to boys alongside strong female voices, we support all adolescents to actualize a new way of inter-relating with each other and their society. Our evaluation results demonstrate success, which we believe is due to the sustained engagement with individuals and communities that informs all our work.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic ZanaAfrica has created new educational content to support adolescents at this time of crisis. Our new social and behavior change communications series, Nia at Home, is a set of educational comics designed to improve the health and resilience of girls throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.