Healthy Lives and Well-Being

Since 2012, I have been active working towards Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG 3). It targets to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages according to World Health Organisation. With such a big global goal, you might wonder if you are contributing to it especially if you work at the community level.

All positive work, no matter how little, adds to the big scheme of things and is very important. The goal is to impact lives and as long as people’s live are changing for the better, it adds up to the target. For the last decade, I have focused on the healthy lives half of the SDG3. It was not by design, I had something to say and do about the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people especially girls and young women.

I founded an organisation, Positive Young Women Voices in the slums of Dandora, where I grew up that integrated healthy living in all we did. We seek to keep girls in school by addressing menstrual health and hygiene, ending poverty by providing financial literacy and small seed grants, mental health by working towards the end violence against women and girls and living positively with HIV. We have reached at least 5,000 plus young women and girls and the community stakeholders and still at it.

All these efforts are dominos towards the bigger goal of healthy lives for at all ages.

What is Well-being?

Well-being however was missing. What is well-being anyway? There is no specific target that shows how to go about this and most of us probably assume that healthy lives and well-being are synonymous.

I am on the path of understanding how well-being fits in this journey and add to it.

The best explanation I have come across on well-being is the model that was coined by Martin Seligman as an acronym PERMA;

P – Positive Emotions

E – Engagement/Flow

R – Relationships

M – Meaning

A –  Achievement

Before my research, I had never come across this as a basis for well-being. This model ensures that wellness can be measured and thus increased.

What we focus on when we think of well-being and happiness is having positive emotions. While being jolly and cheerful is a great indicator, I have lived on this earth long enough to understand this is not enough on it’s own. You also can’t be feeling happy all the time or smiling all the time because life is life.

The other indicator we strive for is achievement. We set goals, get to them and the feeling of joy does not last. I started University when my daughter was getting into kindergarten. It was scary to think I was biting more than I could chew but I hacked it. It took five years with no long breaks in between. I was over the moon when I graduated and kept sharing the videos and photos on social media. After two days, the feeling of joy because of this achievement was wearing down. This is normal and you have probably felt it.

Working on something so hard and for so long and the audacity of the feeling to go down is beyond me.

You are not alone.True well-being is a cocktail of the five pillars highlighted above and keeping them balanced adds to happiness and joy.

We need to be engaged in things that bring meaning, that is larger than you. My meaning has been impacting lives of girls and young women who have had similar experiences to mine. It gives me fulfillment to know I am part of change that we all seek for better lives.

We need authentic connections that water us as you water them. Relationships that make you feel loved and remind you, you belong, you are respected, admired and valued. Having those you can depend on to show up for you in good and bad times gives satisfaction that proves people indeed matter.

Many are the story books that teachers took from me in primary school as I sneaked a read during classes. I would be immersed in the worlds that the authors painted and time made no sense. I now find myself being immersed in the flow of writing just as much. Engaging in activities that make your heart lighter and a smile plastered across your face for the sole reason of enjoying what you are doing is something we all deserve. Is it music, acting, painting that lifts your soul up, then that you should do more of.

When these elements come together and are part of your every day in good measure, you can be said to have well-being.

The question remains, how do we build on this second half of SDG 3 so that we fully achieve this goal and sustain it? I hope this platform will add to it. I would also love to hear what you are doing in your space to ensure well-being is centered in your everyday life, in your work and community.