For the second year, Hivpoint is continuing its Health Buddy Program directed toward
the immigrants and refugees who came to Finland lately and didn’t have the chance to study the
sexual education in their countries. The idea of the program is to increase the knowledge about
sexual health and sexual rights.
Health Buddies 2019
The head of the program has made a big effort to choose and train the right applicants who
wanted to be Health Buddies. In 2019, four individuals from Syria, Iraq, Nepal, and Pakistan have
contributed to distribute information about sexual health and talk about HIV to migrants and refugees with different backgrounds.
The participants used different methods to present and run their workshops. At the end, more
than 300 persons were reached to share information about our program content. With over 95%
positive feedback from the participants the program reached its goals. Read more about Health Buddy Program from here.
New year, new Health Buddies!
This year, the program launched again and 5 new Health Buddies were chosen for the challenge.
Choosing different Health Buddies each time is good from our perspective because it enables reaching new people each time. However, I was part of the Health Buddy program already last year and I continue as a Health Buddy in order to share my experience with the newcomers! The goals and activities for this year remain the same, but different methods might be applied depending on each Health Buddy.
The Health Buddy program highlights are equality between all genders and sexual orientations. Health Buddies have the freedom to choose the artistic and innovative methods they think is good to deliver information in a light and understandable way. This year, we hope to reach more people from different nationalities than last year and engage people to respect everyone’s sexual rights and to have the basic knowledge about sexual health.
Ahmed Fahady
Hivpoint´s Health Buddy 2019&2020
Ahmed Fahady is one of the health buddies who work for Hivpoint, the Finnish HIV Foundation. Fahady has been active as a health buddy since 2019. Advocating sexual health is a matter of heart to Fahady and the workshops he has hosted around sexual health have been extremely inspiring and innovative!