Apprentice Spotlight: Eddy Agbeve

Here at Change Makers we are so pleased to introduce Eddy Agbeve, one of our Change Makers Apprentices from Accra, Ghana. Eddy is one of our most motivated Apprentices. When we first met him we learned that he works for an NGO in Ghana called Curious Minds...interesting name, yes? Then after we got to know him we thought it was fate that he works for this NGO because he has one of the most curious minds you will ever meet! I could write more, but let's let Eddy introduce himself...

"I joined Curious Minds in the 2002 as a volunteer when I was in Senior High School. It took my friend about a year to convince me to join, and I haven't regreted joining this group for a moment. Curious Minds offered me one huge platform to contribute meaningfully to Ghana's national development. My capacities in peer mediation, conflict resolution, advocacy, report writing, and interviewing have been so built up. One important training I attended a few years back really shaped my thinking and how I subsequently deal with the various community folks I work with...The SBCC Learning Lab: I was taken through participatory methods for community engagement, planning and evaluation. This has influenced me so much in how I now interact with the community. Even before I get to the community to organise an outreach event I already know what their major needs are and have many rights-based tools to help us together to arrive at a solution. In fact, at a recent review meeting organised by the Ghana Health Service on Adolescent Reproductive Health, I strongly recommended a human rights-based approach be taken up for SBCC in the new programme strategy that was soon going to be drafted."

"All that said, I didn't always want to work in this area of rights-based social and behavior change. Actually, when I was a young I wanted to become a pilot, but because I love to sleep, my family discouraged me saying that a pilot must always be alert. 'You will crash your plane', they always retorted! As I grew up I realised that flying a plane wasn’t a good idea for me. So I found a new passion ‘Current Affairs’, but how was I going to channel all that passion, and to what? Guess how relieved I was when my French teacher in Junior High School told me to consider journalism as a profession. I was confused as I didn’t know what that was but I liked what I heard after she explained what the profession entailed. Fast forward, I have trained as a journalist and I love every bit of the things I learned back in school, and enjoy what I do, but now I have developed a new passion in the field of health. With my background in journalism and mass communication, and with my knowledge around human rights-based SBCC, I am venturing into the world of health communications. With the many challenges facing the world, I find that this sector provides many opportunities for me to contribute towards helping people improve their lives for the better. Join me as I explore the world in finding the answers to many unanswered questions!!"

Postscript: We are so proud to announce that Eddy was selected to present his work at the 2016 International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE) conference, to be held in Curitiba, Brazil May 22-26.