Youth empowered to prevent HIV/AIDS

With about half of all new adult HIV/AIDS infections taking place among young people, a recently launched UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) project is empowering the youth to become a part of the solution to reverse this trend. Young people are at the centre of UNICEF's Right to Know Initiative (RTK). They are being trained to research, design, and implement communication strategies for reaching out to other young people. In Zambia, the first phase of the project has just been completed. "The programme is underway ... in Zambia the focus is on reproductive health issues and AIDS. We are now engaged in preparing proposals and planning the next round of research," UNICEF Resident Representative Dr Stella Goings, told PlusNews. Twenty-two year old Jumbe Kasongo is part of the core team established to conduct the research. For him, the initiative is about "getting to young people and hearing their voices about AIDS and related issues." "We want to know, what is it they [the youth] want, what kind of information do they have and what would they like to have," Kasongo told PlusNews. Participatory action research was used to gather information from the field and gave the researchers a chance to interact with young people and not be restricted to questionnaires. "We took young people with no background in research, gave them a crash course in data collection and research methods and then provided them with the resources to carry it out. They were able to ask questions in a way that was relevant to the young people," Goings said. Mtendere compound, a low-income urban township in the capital Lusaka, was one of the research sites. The group encountered a number of myths and misconceptions surrounding the disease. According to a report from the RTK core group, some youth in the area still believed that children could contract HIV/AIDS from eating off the same plate as their parents and that sleeping with a virgin could cure the disease. This, however, varied across the country. "In the remote areas there was little or no knowledge and a lot of misconceptions, while youth in urban areas had the information but couldn't relate to it," Kasongo noted. According to Goings, a key finding of the research was that there was less access to information than previously thought. The findings also emphasised the importance of having youth and peer support groups to help the youth make sexual health decisions. The project has helped identify certain gaps in existing prevention campaigns targeting youth. "We have been developing wrong messages for the wrong audience," Kasongo said. Campaigns advocating condom use were an example, he noted. "For many young people condom use is inconsistent and some people don't even know how to use them. They cannot easily access condoms because they are distributed in places where they don't feel comfortable. "So these campaigns should tell us how to use them in posters and languages we can relate to," Kasongo added. While there were no startling findings from the initial phase, the process was still important, as young people involved were not aware of these problems, Goings said. "But we do anticipate as we move on that they may tell us things we don't already know," she added. The RTK initiative is currently underway in Cote d'Ivoire, Namibia, Nigeria, Malawi and Ghana.