In light of the recent discussion about fighting HIV/AIDS with ICT, I've attached an article describing an ongoing World Links project on HIV/AIDS Education which through an online collaborative project links students and teachers in four African countries - Ghana, Uganda, So. Africa and Zimbabwe -- with an online facilitator to explore HIV/AIDS causes, myths, and community action.
The article was featured in last month's Techknowlogia online journal. Anthony Bloome Anglophone Africa Regional Coordinator World Links for Development www.world-links.org www.worldbank.org/worldlinks ************************************************************** SCHOOLS THINK ABOUT HIV/AIDS: A World Links Online Collaborative Project Ann Klofkorn Bloome, World Links HIV/AIDS Consultant1 Can you catch AIDS from kissing? Why doesn't saliva transmit HIV? Why do we care about HIV/AIDS anyway? These are the latest questions discussed by participants in the World Links HIV/AIDS Online Collaborative Project, an ongoing HIV prevention effort conducted mainly via email, using, as resources, the Internet and information downloaded onto a CD-ROM. WORLD LINKS World Links, established in 1997 within the World Bank, is now a program jointly coordinated by the World Bank's World Links for Development Program (WorLD) and the World Links Organization, a non-profit based in Washington, D.C. This international program, currently in twenty-seven developing countries around the world, works with Ministries of Education and secondary schools to promote the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) to enhance teaching and learning. With support from public and private sector partners, World Links has established over 700 school-based Internet Learning Centers. The World Links program focuses on professional development workshops for students and teachers on how computers and the Internet can be used as resources across the curriculum. As part of an ongoing series of workshops, schools participate in a number of online collaborative projects, on topics as diverse as border disputes, solid waste management, bullying, traditional medicine, and HIV/AIDS. WORLD LINKS AND HIV/AIDS At the start of the year 2000, World Links took a look at the HIV/AIDS situation in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa, and Africa in general, and decided to sponsor a new collaborative project on the prevention of HIV. The World Links' Executive Director, Mr. Sam Carlson, and the regional coordinator living in Zimbabwe, Mr. Anthony Bloome, saw how the AIDS epidemic is affecting Africans, their children, their economies and their way of life, and wanted to explore how the program could help. Financial support for the project came partly from an online auction on the program's behalf by Wired magazine. Students and teachers from fifteen schools in four African countries -- Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe - signed up to learn more about HIV/AIDS through the project's educational activities. Over one in four Zimbabwean adults between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine are infected with HIV, and over half a million orphaned children struggle to survive in a deteriorating economy. In South Africa, adult HIV prevalence rose from 2% at the start of the 1990s to nearly 20% by the end of the decade. The AIDS situation in both Ghana and Uganda contrasts with Zimbabwe and South Africa. Uganda used to be the most affected country in the world in the 1990s, but has since brought its adult HIV prevalence under 10%. This was done through sincere government interventions, public discussions, and the encouragement of condom use. Ghana has been fortunate enough to keep its adult HIV prevalence under 5%, partly because of its location in West Africa, where HIV is neither as prevalent or as virulent as in Southern Africa. A SOUTH AFRICAN EXAMPLE A typical World Links school, Mpophomeni is in a township in the Midlands of KwaZulu/Natal, in the east of South Africa. AIDS is a huge killer in the township. Seven hundred and fifty students and eighteen teachers work at the school every weekday. One teacher, Pam Robertson, and her students have been participating in the HIV/AIDS Collaborative Project for over a year. The teacher continues to participate despite her busy schedule and problems with connectivity, because, "even though there is a lot of information about [HIV/AIDS], we don't seem to be winning the battle...Each year we have girls who fall pregnant. This shows that our students are sexually active at a young age and that they are engaging in unprotected sex. My hope is that through projects like this one our students will think more seriously about the risk that AIDS poses to their lives." COLLABORATIVE PROJECT ACTIVITIES With the help of the World Bank's AIDS Campaign Team for Africa (ACTAfrica), World Links designed a five-month collaborative project on HIV/AIDS. First, students and teachers introduced themselves via a questionnaire, then went to work on four educational goal activities, one each month. The teachers and students explored the myths often associated with HIV and AIDS, conducted individual and team research to separate these from the facts about the disease, and discussed how they could prevent HIV in their own communities. Working in World Links computer laboratories in schools or community centers, participants responded to the questions raised by posting their replies on a private, moderated LISTSERV. The first HIV/AIDS educational activity made sure that participants knew the basic facts of HIV/AIDS - what HIV and AIDS are, how they differ, and some statistics for each country. Participants confronted common myths, such as the belief that mosquitoes or sharing eating utensils or toilets can transmit the virus. Students and their teachers also discussed controversial issues, such as the kissing questions above, or the effectiveness of condoms. The second activity explored why the issue of HIV/AIDS is important to the participants, their school, community and country. Activity three had the students out in their community interviewing authorities such as clinic workers, traditional healers, and pastors. Participants also discussed whether the blood supply in their country is safe -- for the most part, it is. The topic of culture and its influence on HIV prevention prompted many contributions to the project LISTSERV. These discussions and interviews led to the last activity, Social Action. SOCIAL ACTION The HIV/AIDS Collaborative Project challenged each school to design an HIV/AIDS Action Plan, through which the students could attempt to make an impact on their community. Most schools planned to prevent the further spread of HIV or to alleviate the effects of HIV/ AIDS on the infected or affected, for example, the many orphans not attending school. One school moved from plan to action. The West Africa Secondary School (WASS), in Ghana, under the leadership of Mr. Chris Kwei, worked with AIDS Action Ghana (AAG), a local non-governmental organization (NGO), to train student peer educators. WASS and AAG held a workshop at the school to train students to help their peers learn correct information about HIV/AIDS. Peer education is an important tool for HIV prevention, because knowing the facts is the first step towards safe sexual behavior among youth. 13th INTERNATIONAL AIDS CONFERENCE The 2000 World Links HIV/AIDS Collaborative Project culminated in the 13th International AIDS Conference, held for the first time in Africa. One teacher and student from each of the four countries attended the weeklong conference, held in Durban, South Africa, in July 2000. The students and teachers were thrilled by the dramatic Opening Ceremony, learned a lot of new facts about HIV/AIDS at the conference sessions, and joined thousands of conference delegates to hear Nelson Mandela close the conference by calling on everyone around the world to break the silence surrounding HIV and AIDS. 2001 COLLABORATIVE PROJECT - YEAR 2 Because of student enthusiasm and the continuing epidemic, World Links decided to sponsor the HIV/AIDS Collaborative Project for a second year. Twenty-five schools are participating this year and the activities have been stretched over six months to promote even more discussion in each activity. New this year are more partners and enhanced discussion. With the help of the United Negro College Fund and Metro Teen AIDS, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C., high schools in the United States capital are joining the project. The DC students seem to have very similar information needs as their peers in Africa, as many do not know the percentage of adults infected in their own country (less than 1% overall, but increasing), let alone the impact of the epidemic around the world. In addition, World Links' Alliance for Global Learning partner organization, the International Education and Resource Network (I@EARN), wrote a successful proposal to the US State Department for an expansion of the project. In the second half of 2001, three more African countries will join the project -- Botswana, Nigeria and Zambia. ENHANCING HIV/AIDS MATERIALS The funding from the State Department will also parallel World Link's additional efforts to get HIV/AIDS materials into schools: in print, on CD-ROM, and over the Internet. As of now, schools have few comprehensive HIV/AIDS materials available to them in any medium. I@EARN and World Links plan to remedy this by gathering for review HIV/AIDS materials from the US, Africa -- and Russia, where Metro Teen AIDS has worked. Materials will be reviewed with teachers, representatives from HIV/AIDS NGOs, and other affected individuals at a pre-workshop to the Africa Connects/I@EARN Conference held in Cape Town, South Africa, this July. The goal of the workshop will be to start the production process for needed materials, and ultimately to make resources available to answer any question on HIV/AIDS, even in remote areas. The State Department funding also enables teachers from the seven African countries to visit the United States. In early 2002, about two dozen of the teachers who have been working with the collaborative project will meet in Washington, D.C. to visit their counterparts' schools, as well as youth centers run by Metro Teen AIDS. SUSTAINABILITY -- LINKING SCHOOLS WITH HIV/AIDS NGOS World Links and its partners hope that the HIV/AIDS collaborative project will be only the start of activities in school communities in the US and Africa. The project also aims to link each school with a local HIV/AIDS organization. World Links envisions this as a "win-win" situation. The schools would help the HIV/AIDS groups learn how to use e-mail, the Internet, and computers in general to enhance their HIV/AIDS interventions. The HIV/AIDS experts in turn would assist with HIV prevention and lessening the impact of AIDS by training students to be peer educators and home-based volunteers for AIDS sufferers. The World Links project has already proven that such joint activities are possible through the work of West Africa Secondary School and AIDS Action Ghana, and hopes to have a collaboration of this sort in each school's community by the end of 2002. As for the discussion questions about kissing, participants rightly agreed that kissing is much less risky than sex. As well, World Links and project participants agree that the project is a small but important contribution to HIV/AIDS work in Africa, at least in the lives of the participating students and teachers. 1 Ms. Klofkorn lived in Zimbabwe from 1998 to 2000, and while there served as Programme Officer for a network of Zimbabwean HIV/AIDS groups. ------------ ***GKD is an initiative of the Global Knowledge Partnership*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.globalknowledge.org>
