Room E304 Diakonia Conference Centre, 20 St Andrew's Street, Durban, 4001, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Tel : +27 (0)31 310 3565 Fax : +27 (0)31 310 3566
Lifeskills for HIV prevention
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Project Empower has developed a core life skills course for out-of-school youth. Developed out of needs analyses and training in various communities such as Luganda and Bhambayi, the content of the course comes from our own work in numerous communities in the greater Durban area as well as several acknowledged life skills manuals. Out-of-school youth are a most vulnerable social group. They are most likely to be unemployed, use drugs, engage in violent and anti-social behaviour and experience the highest level of HIV incidence (new HIV infections). Because they are not represented in social institutions such as places of work or education, it is also difficult to reach them with common social intervention strategies. The marginalization of out-of-school youth is intensified in poor communities such as informal settlements. In order to prevent new infections, it is essential to reach out-of-school youth with HIV prevention campaigns. These campaigns need to do more than impart information about HIV, they need to address the social (lived) realities of young people’s lives. As well as addressing a lack of information about how HIV is contracted and how it can be prevented, the campaign needs to enable young people to become agents of change in their own lives and in the lives of their communities. |
| Primary and secondary HIV prevention |
As the HIV epidemic has progressed in South Africa, it has pulled attention away from prevention of primary infection towards strategies for mitigating its impact. We thus see a proliferation of home based care groups and programmes targeting orphans and vulnerable children with fewer mechanisms aimed at supporting individuals who are not infected with HIV and who wish to stay HIV negative. The prevention of primary HIV infections is still a key component in the fight against HIV and it is especially important to focus prevention efforts on youth, especially teenagers. Strategies aimed at HIV prevention are by necessity complex, and need to focus on, amongst other things:
Life skills groups are an ideal vehicle for developing these and other skills and understandings, especially among young people. In the context of a skillfully facilitated peer group, individuals can explore their realities, understand and develop their strengths and become more aware of hidden drives and desires. In this context too, individuals can be supported when they choose to undergo voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) and the group as a whole can explore the implications of either a positive or negative HIV test result for future lifestyle choices. |
| Prevention is for everyone |
It is important though, that life skills groups do not become another way of discriminating against HIV positive people and do not deepen existing stigmas directed against people living with HIV. In reality, healthy lifestyle strategies and personal and interpersonal choices are very similar for both HIV negative and HIV positive people and therefore Circles of Support need to be directed towards enabling both sero-positive and sero-negative individuals to develop healthier physical, psychological and interpersonal lives. In addition, it would be impossible (and detrimental to the project), to ascertain/prescribe the HIV status of individual members of the groups. This proposal describes a programme to work with groups of young people in marginal communities. The programme is centred around the delivery of life skills training programme with a strong focus on self awareness, group support and action. The proposal covers a period 1 year (pilot scale) for 4 groups of young people in different social settings. The process culminates in an evaluation, review and documentation process that will inform the content and design of a scaled up programme of work over multiple years. |