The Rainbow Flower Tool

The Rainbow Flower is one of the tools that Children for Health to help teachers understand at a deep level what the differences are between a traditional health education approach and a participatory health education approach.

The context for this is not just that schools want to deliver more participatory health education, although I hope they do, there's a global context for this. There's the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has participation as one of its principles, and because of this, you find that the principle of 'participation and empowerment' within a whole range of policy documents, including one on global health strategy regarding adolescent health.

At Children for Health, the cohort of children we aim to reach is between about the ages of 10 and 14, these are young adolescents and within the age group that this particular strategy is talking about.

What this tool does is show how to put this participation and empowerment principle into practice, and that's often where these strategies and where these principles fall down. How is it that we actually make children and adolescents feel empowered? How do we get them to participate? Our Rainbow Flower is a tool that we hope that teachers can use to help them to do that.

The Rainbow Flower has seven petals and these petals are roles, words, wheels, skills, places, values, and connections.

1. The roles are about the roles of the children.
2. The words are a diagnostic way to see whether something is suitable enough to be in a programme.
3. The wheels are the wheels of a tricycle and we need all three wheels to be working for the health education approach to be working.
4. The skills are the things that we need the children to learn so that they become good at their particular roles, the new roles which we want them to have.
5. The places are where the activities happen.
6. The values are the driving energies of this work.
7. The connections are what actually makes this health education deep and deeply embedded within a person.

For more about the Rainbow Flower and to download it click here.

training-tool/https://www.childrenforhealth.org/how-we-do-it/training-workshops-tools-resources/children-health-training-tools-rainbow-flower/