Building capacity on young people and prevention
30 March 2007
The Alliance has been working with non-governmental and community-based organisation staff from across Uganda to explore how best to reduce young people’s vulnerability to HIV.
Two workshops carried out at the end of last year were attended by a wide range of staff, including programme officers, peer educators, social workers and field coordinators from 24 organisations. There was a good gender mix and one of the workshops was also attended by young people.
Facilitators and participants worked as if they themselves formed a community during the workshops, enabling participants to see how their community is made up, how it is fluid, how the different stakeholders interact and how this can impact on HIV prevention work. Participants were able to practise tools aimed at involving and mobilising the community to explore young peoples’ vulnerability to HIV and in planning responses.
Group work, plenary discussions and participatory tools were used to help them explore and share their ideas around youth participation. These challenged some of their assumptions around the extent to which they were already achieving participation and sent them away equipped with new methods for fully and actively involving young people in programming.
In feedback, participants said that the ABY approach (abstinence, be faithful, work with youth) presents a barrier to effective youth participation. Rather than young people being involved in the process of developing key prevention messages, the approach provides prescribed messages, such as those seen on abstinence-only posters.
They also reported that the use of an Anonymous Participatory Survey had been a key learning area, allowing them to examine their own behaviour, values and realities and highlighting the gaps that can occur between our own values and practices and those we prescribe for young people. The facilitators also instilled a culture of talking about people like us, which enabled safe discussions and avoided anyone having to expose their own beliefs and practices.
Men and women worked in separate groups to explore their ideas around sex and sexuality, then come back together to challenge some of their thinking around gender roles and attitudes to sex. Participants felt this enabled a more honest and full discussion, and that they could see the value of using this methodology with young people.
The use of role play gave participants an opportunity to practise techniques for improving young peoples’ life skills in areas such as assertiveness and saying ‘No’. ‘100 ways to show love’ and drama skits on casual sex showed ways of using innovative and interactive activities to explore abstinence and fidelity. In these activities, many discussions emerged around poverty and rape as a reason to have sex. People were very concerned that without a focus on income replacement options this situation is hard to improve, and that to deny condoms in such a situation is putting young people at risk of HIV.
Implicit in many discussions was the feeling that participants and their organisations see the need to provide comprehensive prevention programming to young people. Many said that, where possible, they would provide information on all prevention options and refer to service providers who provide information and condoms where necessary.
The request to build knowledge on young people and HIV prevention came from the CORE Consortium, part of a programme led by CARE International that works in partnership with the Ugandan Ministry of Gender and civil society organisations.
