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australia

At the core of Marie Stopes’ work is community consultation.  Every program is shaped around the cultural and societal differences that exist within the different groups that we work with.  No program more so than our Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander program, SNAKE Condoms.  SNAKE was developed in 2004 in partnership with both the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO) and the Australian Government Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health (OATSIH).  Created by a group of adolescent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth from Mildura in Victoria, SNAKE is the first and only condom designed for and by Indigenous youth.

 

Current Projects

  • Sexual health education for young people
  • Community events known as SNAKEfests
  • Sexual health training for Aboriginal Health Workers
  • Sexual health ‘toolkit’ for Health Workers and communities
  • Indigenous sexual health website www.snakecondoms.org.au

 

Key Achievements
 
  • In 2009, the SNAKE project distributed 112,000 socially marketed condoms to young Indigenous Australians
  • Last year, SNAKE conducted Aboriginal Health Worker training that reached over 140 health workers
  • The program reached out to over 200 Indigenous communities with the latest SNAKE information and Indigenous sexual health news through the SNAKE Yarns newsletter in 2009

 

Her Story

Delsey, a youth worker from the Danila Dilba Health Service in the Northern Territory of Australia says that the SNAKE Initiative, ‘…is a good initiative because it promotes safe sex and it is really important that we try to promote condom use as much as possible to try and reduce the sexually transmitted infection rates and teenage pregnancies. I think it is a really great initiative because it was developed by Indigenous young people for Indigenous young people. I’d like to see the SNAKEfests and SNAKE condoms to be right across the country. It should be in every Indigenous community. Different communities can adapt the concept to a way that will suit them, culturally and sensitively, but I think it should be done as far and as wide as possible.’