LifeLab goes international

The University of Southampton’s successful LifeLab programme has been launched in South Africa. LifeLab gives young people the knowledge and skills they need to make healthier life choices. They take part in fun and engaging sessions, conduct experiments, meet scientists, and learn first-hand why and how to lead healthier lives.

Working with Dr Lisa Ware at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, academics from the Faculty of Medicine involved in LifeLab, have established a LifeLab equivalent in South Africa focusing on people aged 18- to 25-year-olds.

It was set up with a grant from the South African National Research Foundation, after a study found 80% of 18- to 25-year-olds had literacy scores that were suboptimal. “Life stress” was also a common feature in the lives of youth living in a low resource urban- environments, and this was associated with multiple health risks.

The team developed and implemented a LifeLab curriculum for people living in Soweto, South Africa, and are currently assessing its impact with a view with to rolling it out to more youth living in Soweto.

Shane Norris, Professor of Global Health, is part of the Southampton team, and said: “The early research emphasised the need for a community-based intervention like LifeLab in low resource urban- environments like Soweto.

“We are really pleased with how the first curriculum has been received and helped young people in the area understand the science behind the heath messages and engage with their own health, think about how to take responsibility for it and make decisions to improve it.”

LifeLab programmes are now also running in Dublin and Sydney.

“In growing the LifeLab family worldwide, what we have found so significant is that despite cultural, socioeconomic, age and curriculum differences, what LifeLab promotes in terms of health engagement resonates very strongly with the young people involved no matter where they live,” said Kath Woods-Townsend, LifeLab Director here in the UK.

“We have worked with our global partners to provide not only the physical LifeLab resources and programme structures, but also our experience with securing funding, engaging local health and political organisations and working with schools to enable their journey to deliver LifeLab to be as smooth as possible. It has been an educational process for all of us involved to see the assessing and amending of LifeLab to fit different cultural contexts and curriculums.”