”Ahora es Cuando” – Now is the Time – is the name, and also an important message of Women and Girls Lead Global’s (WGLG) campaign in Peru. Traveling to remote rural communities in the Amazon and Andes regions, the WGLG Peru team found that parents and adolescents in these communities were deeply uncomfortable discussing important reproductive health issues and associated risks. Urging parents to talk to their teens sooner rather than later about these pressing issues, the Ahora es Cuando campaign highlights the important connection between timely access to reproductive health information and the completion of secondary school.
In a poignant PSA produced by WGLG in Peru, audiences are introduced to a number of young people and the difficult questions they never dared ask their parents. The questions haunting the teens featured in the PSA are based on the real testimonies of youth participating in WGLG’s activities in Peru. Collected anonymously at WGLG youth events on thin strips of colored paper, teens wrote down questions like “Why do you neglect me?”, “Have you ever regretted that I was born?” and “Why did you have a child with another woman?” Spoken out loud (often for the first time) in the PSA, these questions will now travel the country as part of Ahora es Cuando campaign activities. The PSA was first premiered at the Ahora es Cuando launch event in Lima as a lead-up to International Women’s Day 2014. It is now being screened in some of Peru’s most remote communities, including those in the Amazon and Andes regions, with the goal of helping parents understand the urgency of communicating more openly with their teens, and supporting them to find the resources they need to grow into healthy, successful adults.
