(from left) Mr Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of UNAIDS; Ms Yoka Brandt, Director-General, International Cooperation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Netherlands
Credit: UNAIDS/F. Chironi

UNAIDS governing body, the Programme Coordinating Board (PCB) is holding its 26th Board meeting from 22-24 June 2010 in Geneva.

UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé addressed the Board on 23 June giving an overview of progress in last six months by the Secretariat, partners and Cosponsors. The UNAIDS Annual Report 2009 was also shared with the Board members.

In his speech, “Delivering results in transformative times”, Mr Sidibé laid out a “reinvigorated mission” for the Joint Programme. Mr Sidibé also identified five challenges for UNAIDS and described approaches for a more focussed UNAIDS, acting more strategically, increased flexibility and responsiveness, a more efficient Secretariat and more accountability.

On 22 June a thematic session took place on “Linking Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) services with HIV/AIDS interventions in practice”. Issues related to gender and youth education were also discussed under this theme.

Stakeholders involved in the AIDS response have always been of the opinion that the Millennium Development Goals will not be achieved without ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health and HIV prevention, treatment, care and support.

The majority of HIV infections are sexually transmitted or are associated with pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding; and the risk of HIV transmission and acquisition can be further increased due to the presence of certain sexually transmitted infections (STI). HIV is the leading cause of death in women of reproductive age, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, and contributes significantly to maternal mortality.

UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé has maintained that, “If we integrate HIV into maternal health programmes, we can make huge progress on almost every global development goal. We can stop mothers from dying of HIV and dramatically reduce maternal mortality.” Most of UNAIDS cosponsors are also involved in improving this field, enhancing human rights and promoting HIV prevention services.

The thematic session of the Board meeting provided a platform for stakeholders and participants to review the challenges of integrating sexual and reproductive health services with HIV interventions and vice-versa, and share lessons and best practices.

Special attention was paid to young people and gender issues, where progress in involving men and boys in SRH services and programmes that address harmful gender norms were included. Young people tend to be more motivated to use condoms to prevent unintended pregnancy than HIV. Programmes that focus on both can broaden their appeal and have an important impact on preventing pregnancy and STIs.

Sexual violence, sexual diversity and sexuality education with due respect to human rights, gender issues and greater involvement of people living with HIV was also addressed.

Participants were invited to discuss opportunities for women to control or influence their own sexuality and reproduction and to become familiar with the female condom. For pregnant women living with HIV, the single most significant intervention that could reduce maternal mortality, and virtually eliminate vertical transmission -- namely the timely initiation of antiretroviral therapy for life -- remains largely underutilized.

Established in 1994 by a resolution of the UN Economic and Social Council and launched in January 1996, UNAIDS is guided by a Programme Coordinating Board (PCB) with representatives of 22 governments from all geographic regions, the UNAIDS Cosponsors, and five representatives of nongovernmental organizations, including associations of people living with HIV.

“This is a unique experience with the UN I’ve never seen elsewhere,” said Lisa Sherburne, an HIV specialist with Save the Children. Credit: UN

Pham Xuan Tung talks eagerly and takes notes for his group during a biology lesson on HIV transmission and the replication of the virus in blood cells. This new type of highly interactive class is something Tung, a student at Hoang Quoc Viet upper secondary school in Dong Trieu District, Quang Ninh Province, clearly enjoys.

The class is based on a new, integrated reproductive health and HIV prevention curriculum for secondary school students being developed and piloted by the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), with support from UNICEF, UNFPA, UNESCO and Save the Children in Viet Nam. Many students in Quang Ninh Province, Quang Tri Province and Ho Chi Minh City are following the new pilot curriculum.

A comprehensive national HIV prevention curriculum

Many students in Quang Ninh Province, Quang Tri Province and Ho Chi Minh City are following the new pilot curriculum. Credit: UN

“I have seen a positive change in the participation of students in my class. The new teaching and learning method allows room for every student to speak up, and they are much more responsive,” said Tung’s teacher Truong Thi Hoa.

The new curriculum for secondary schools nationwide draws on UN-supported work in schools, including healthy living and life skills programmes, reproductive health and HIV prevention initiatives, and pre-service training for teachers. Integrating the areas into core lessons and extra-curricular activities, it includes special training for parents so they can better discuss HIV and reproductive health issues with their children – subjects that can be particularly sensitive and difficult to address.

“This is a unique experience with the UN I’ve never seen elsewhere,” said Lisa Sherburne, an HIV specialist with Save the Children. “It allows more resources, more cohesive actions and a more powerful voice for the Viet Nam education sector.”

The changes are all aimed at integrating HIV prevention into the next national curriculum framework and new textbooks to be developed by the ministry and approved by the National Assembly in 2015.

However, many challenges remain. The ministry needs strong political leadership and greater capacity for planning and coordination, sufficient resources, teachers with better capacity, and effective intra-ministry and multisectoral coordination.

“Our biggest challenge is how to facilitate the close collaboration among departments in the ministry and among ministries related to the education sector response to HIV,” says La Quy Don, vice director of MOET’s Department of Student Affairs.

For Eamonn Murphy, UNAIDS Viet Nam Country Director, this is also a top priority.  “We are committed to providing joint support for policy-making, enhanced coordination and implementation of several key aspects of the education sector’s response to HIV.”

Empowering young people to protect themselves against HIV is a key priority area in UNAIDS Outcome Framework 2009-11.

As the 2010 World Cup kicks off this Friday, thousands of football fans will arrive in South Africa to cheer on their favourite teams.

HIV awareness and prevention is also a high priority during this time. HIV can spread particularly among young people, through the dangerous combination of alcohol and unsafe sex.

As HIV can be spread through unprotected sex, condoms are vital to protecting people from HIV infection. Male and female condoms are the most efficient, available technologies to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

And to reduce the risk of HIV transmission, advocates count on making condoms readily available. Previously successful campaigns have included free condoms in match venues, hotels, stadiums, bars, and clubs. As one fan said, “condoms are more useful with me than in a warehouse.”

Condoms are a key component of the combination prevention package to reduce the sexual transmission of HIV. Other components include delay of sexual initiation, abstinence, being mutually faithful to each other when both partners are uninfected, and reducing the number of sexual partners.

UNAIDS commends the South African government’s commitment to distribute condoms during the World Cup. We support the efforts carried out by the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC) and civil society groups, including the Treatment Action Campaign and AIDS Consortium, to ensure that condoms and HIV information are made widely available during the tournament.

Each day, 7 400 people are infected with HIV worldwide. In South Africa, the host of this year’s World Cup, 5.7 million people are living with HIV ─ the largest number worldwide.

Young leaders have innovative ideas about how to reach their peers.

Following UNAIDS calls for putting young people’s leadership at the centre of national HIV responses, a new small grants programme for youth-led organizations and projects, the HIV Young Leaders Fund, announced their request for proposals. The mission of the Fund is to enable new leadership in the AIDS response among young people who are most-at-risk and vulnerable to HIV and young people living with HIV.

“Peer-based programming is highly effective yet chronically underfunded and youth-led programs often lack support for core resources,” said Liping Mian, World AIDS Campaign Youth Campaign Coordinator and HIV Young Leaders Fund Interim Steering Committee member.

Globally, young people aged 15-24 account for 40% of all new infections and in 2008; at least 2 out of every 5 people newly infected with HIV were 15-24 years old.

As noted in its Outcome Framework: Joint Action for Results (2009-2011), UNAIDS has made empowering young people one of its priority areas. The goal in this priority area is to reduce the number of new HIV infections among young people (aged 10 to 24 years) by providing comprehensive sexual and reproductive knowledge, skills, services and commodities in a safe and enabling environment, tailored to the specific country and epidemic context.

Depending on the context, most-at-risk and vulnerable young people include young men who have sex with men, young transgenders, young sex workers, young injecting drug users, young women and young people living with HIV.

The Fund, administered by the Tides Foundation, will support youth led organizations and youth-led projects working on peer-based services, community mobilization, and advocacy. Organizations from all countries can apply for grants whose amount range goes from $1,000 to $30,000. The deadline for grant applications is May 1, 2010. Grant-making decisions will be made by regional community review panels composed of young leaders.

The new small grants programme is one of the recommendations from the 2009 aids2031 Young Leaders Summit that took place in Oslo in June 23 – 25. During the three day Summit, more than 30 young leaders from around the world worked together to identify pressing stigma and discrimination issues for young people and identify ways to leverage current strategies and collaborations.

To request grant materials in Arabic, English, French, Russian or Spanish, please e-mail HIVYoungLeadersFund@gmail.com

An Interim Steering Committee serves as the governing body for the HIV Young Leaders Fund in 2010. The following organizations are on this governing body: Global Network of Sex Work Projects, Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS, GNP+’s Interim Reference Group on Young People Living with HIV, International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, Jamaica Youth Advocacy Network, World AIDS Campaign, Youth Coalition for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, Y-PEER, Young Positives, and Youth R.I.S.E.

Credit: © UNICEF/UKRA01115/Pirozzi
UNICEF wants to help Ukraine’s many young injecting drug users protect themselves against HIV

Oksana is a teenage mother with a very young baby. She is also living on the streets of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. Having lost touch with her mother, who was sent to prison, she ran away from home to escape her abusive stepfather. She spends most of her day at the central railway station or the underground tunnels nearby but dreams of one day having a settled home for her son. These dreams are unlikely to be realised any time soon.

She is one of the many young people eking out a living on Ukraine’s streets who get no care and support. An unsafe social environment and high risk behaviour such as sex work and injecting drugs make young people living in the streets of Ukraine vulnerable to HIV. They are at the heart of an epidemic in the country worst affected by HIV in Europe and yet rarely have access to HIV prevention and treatment services.

One of the central aims of UNICEF in Ukraine is to try to help these most-at-risk young people, especially those who are homeless, to better protect themselves against HIV. Key activities include supporting outreach teams working with street children and adolescents, training social and health care workers and providing access to basic health services, education, training and housing.

According to the latest statistics, in 2006 more than 60% of injection drug users in Kyiv were living with HIV. In 2009, UNICEF conducted a study among street-based adolescents in several regions of Ukraine, which found high rates of drug use by injection, with two thirds of those having reported sharing needles. The study also revealed that one in ten male street adolescents had had sex with another male, often in exchange for money, clothes, or drugs.

Olena Sakovych is a UNICEF youth and adolescent development officer, who works closely with street children, as well as other most-at-risk adolescents. She is fully aware of the extent of the problem, with some young people initiating drug use by injection as early as age 13, and both boys and girls living on the streets often engaging in sex work at a similar age.

“These young people are the missing face of the HIV epidemic in Ukraine,” says Olena. “They need better care and more services. The situation here is critical. One of our main objectives at UNICEF is to make them visible to Ukraine’s political agenda and its AIDS response.”

The findings of the research informed the development of interventions and provision of health and social services to better address the needs of and help adolescents injecting drugs and engaging in sex work. In the city of Mykolyav, for example, outreach workers now recruit young female sex workers to a drop-in centre that offers a safe space, HIV counseling, and referrals to governmental health and social services centres, and non-governmental organizations that provide HIV prevention services, care and support.

Social workers accompany the women to those services, when necessary, which include gynaecological and infectious disease specialists, HIV treatment centres, and legal aid. Demand has far exceeded expectations. It was hoped that 50 under-aged sex workers would be recruited in the first six months. To date, well over a hundred adolescent girls have received services. A client satisfaction survey showed an increase in knowledge about HIV, as well as in motivation to seek help.

"UNICEF will continue to advocate for, and to support, country efforts to increase understanding of the epidemic and HIV prevention, protection, care and support services for most-at-risk adolescents,” says Susan Kasedde, UNICEF Senior Specialist on HIV Prevention among Adolescents. “In countries like Ukraine, until such services are made available, national epidemics cannot be stopped."

To this end, UNICEF promotes mobilization of governmental leadership; national and local political and community support; legislative and policy changes to enable wider access to HIV prevention and care services for most-at-risk adolescents, and strong partnership between the United Nations, government, civil society, young people themselves and people living with HIV.

“Ensuring that those most vulnerable to HIV infection like, young people on the streets, injecting drug users, those engaging in sex work, and men who have sex with men, have access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support services is both a human right and a way to finally reverse the spread of the HIV epidemic,” says UNAIDS Country Coordinator Ani Shakarishvili. “Ukraine is continuing to make progress towards universal access but far more needs to be done. Strong political leadership and commitment will guarantee success. “

The Sixth Central American Congress on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections (CONCASIDA) will take place in San Jose, Costa Rica from 1-5 March 2010 with the theme "Youth: for my right to know and decide."

CONCASIDA, a multi-sector event which aims at sharing experiences, scientific information and research, takes place every two years in a Central American country. This year, the congress aims to focus its attention on youth vulnerability of Central American countries due to the lack of sexual education and the increase in infections within this age group. CONCASIDA also aims to analyze the social impact of this on Central American nations.

A 2008 study carried out by the United Nations Population Fund and UNICEF with support from UNAIDS showed that the majority of young people in Costa Rica were sexually active at the age of 16. The study also highlighted that there was lack of HIV information and knowledge among Costa Rican youth.

The study shows that in Limón only about 28% of the young people interviewed know how to use a condom correctly whereas in Puntarenas the percentage drops to about 17%. Furthermore, in both provinces, more than 50% of the adolescents find that asking a partner to use a condom could be interpreted as a sign of mistrust. Finally, 43% in both provinces think that a young girl carrying condoms in her purse is a woman with a “doubtful reputation.”

This year’s main themes of the congress include care, control and surveillance; prevention and promotion; risk factors for social and psycho-emotional; human rights and legislation; and monitoring and evaluation of HIV and AIDS commitments.

During the congress, different stakeholders will present the result of their work and search alternatives for more effective ways to respond to the AIDS epidemic.

A version of this story was first published at www.unicef.org  

Actress Lupita Nyong'o in a scene from the Kenyan TV drama ‘Shuga’.
Credit: UNICEF

At its New York headquarters, UNICEF highlighted a recent collaboration with MTV through a screening of ‘Shuga’, a three-part TV drama about a group of young friends living in Nairobi, Kenya. As they explore the complexities of love, the characters confront the risk of HIV infection – and learn that a positive test result is not a death sentence.

MTV produced the programme in collaboration with UNICEF and other partners, including the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.

MTV has a long standing commitment to the AIDS response and has been partner of UNAIDS and its co-sponsors since 1996.

Partnerships like this one play a vital role in UN’s efforts to halt and reverse the AIDS pandemic. When it comes to delivering messages about HIV prevention, working with media and entertainment partners such as MTV provides a valuable – and credible – connection to young audiences.

‘Meaningful engagement’

“It’s fast, it’s furious, it’s cool – and that’s exactly how we filmed it,” said actress Lupita Nyong’o, who plays a lead role in ‘Shuga’ as Ayira, a college student who finds herself torn between a boyfriend her own age and an older man. Ms. Nyong’o attended the screening and a panel discussion that followed, along with representatives of key partners in the project.

UNICEF collaborated with MTV to create ‘Shuga’, a TV drama set in Nairobi, Kenya. It includes messages about HIV prevention for young people.
Credit: UNICEF

The series shows how behaviours – including sexual involvement with multiple partners, sexual exploitation and alcohol abuse – can make young people more vulnerable to HIV.

During the panel discussion, PEPFAR Senior HIV/AIDS Prevention Advisor Tijuana A. James-Traore noted the programme’s power to speak effectively to young viewers.

“This is really what we mean when we talk about the meaningful engagement of young people in issues that impact their own lives,” she said. “No other person or persons, I think, could have communicated the messages in the way these young people have done.”

A regional priority

Messages about AIDS prevention are especially crucial in eastern and southern Africa, the heart of the global epidemic.

Lupita Nyong'o, a star of the Kenyan TV drama ‘Shuga’, attended a screening of the programme at UNICEF headquarters and took part in a panel discussion that followed.
Credit: UNICEF

“Young women in eastern and southern Africa are particularly severely affected by HIV,” said the Senior Specialist in HIV Prevention with UNICEF’s Unite for Children, Unite against AIDS campaign, Susan Kasedde. “In some countries, as many as three young women to each young man are infected,” she added.

Starting a dialogue

While popular dramas like ‘Shuga’ will not end the epidemic on their own, they can lead to dialogue about the risks of HIV infection. They can also help to combat the stigma that people living with HIV sometimes face.

“We’re not the silver bullet,” said MTV International’s Vice President for Social Responsibility, John Jackson. “We’re not going to solve this problem. But we’re a critical player in getting a certain section of our community to think, to have a conversation they might not have otherwise.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is assessing the effectiveness of ‘Shuga’ in changing behaviour within its target audience. For some members of the cast, that change has already begun.

“Especially where we were doing the scenes where we were doing the HIV testing,” said Lupita Nyong’o, “there was a hush on the set. It was a heavy time for us, and a lot of the actors said, ‘This is real. Yeah, this is real – and I need to make a change in my life.”

A version of this story was first published at www.worldbank.org

Small stipends paid directly to young girls have had a powerful impact on their school attendance in Malawi, reducing drop-out rates considerably and helping to protect them from HIV. That’s among the findings from a study, supported by the World Bank, of a two-year cash transfer programme targeting girls aged 13 to 22 that wrapped up in December 2009.

Stipends ranging from $1-$5 a month for the adolescent girls, in addition to payments to parents that ranged from $4-$10, reduced drop-out rates by approximately 40 percent.

And, for every extra dollar a girl received above $1, “enrolment increased by a percentage point,” says Berk Özler, a senior economist with the World Bank’s Development Research Group.

Özler and fellow researchers Sarah Baird of The George Washington University and Craig McIntosh of the University of California, San Diego, wanted to test the best way to use cash payments known as conditional cash transfers to boost school enrolment among young women in sub-Saharan Africa.

Drop-out rates are high among teenage girls in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in Africa. One of the main reasons is the relatively high cost of secondary school. Another is that Malawian girls tend to marry at a young age, and “once a girl is married, schooling is over,” says Özler.

Keeping girls in school who otherwise would have dropped out may not only increase learning, but delay marriage and reduce the rate of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Adult HIV prevalence in Malawi is around 12 percent, according to UNAIDS estimates.

In another paper, researchers found that the onset of sexual activity was significantly delayed among girls who took part in the programme, and their likelihood of being married or pregnant after one year had declined.

Past studies have suggested that “just the fact of being in school may lead to these desirable outcomes but the evidence was scant,” Özler says.

These current findings reinforce UNAIDS’ evidence-based contention that girls continuing their education greatly lowers their vulnerability to HIV. For those who stay in secondary school, each additional year means they are more likely to develop the skills and experience needed to keep themselves safe from HIV.

According to Patrick Brenny, UNAIDS Country Coordinator in Malawi, the study underlines the critical necessity of a comprehensive approach to reducing young women and girls' risk and vulnerability to HIV infection in Malawi.

“Staying in school is part of an effective ‘social vaccine’ with respect to sexual risk behaviour,” said Mr Brenny.

Empowering young people to protect themselves against HIV is one of the nine priority areas in the UNAIDS Outcome Framework 2009-11.

Cash transfers boost schooling, nutrition

In countries without adequate safety net support, children’s nutrition often suffers, and children, especially girls, are taken out of school. In an attempt to counteract this trend, some 29 developing countries have put in place some type of conditional cash transfers programme to boost schooling and nutrition, with many others planning on piloting one.

The World Bank backs conditional cash transfers programmes in 13 countries. It provided $2.4 billion to such initiatives in 2009 during the global economic crisis. Studies have found that cash payments to the female head of household leads to better outcomes for children and families. In Brazil, for instance, the chance of childhood survival increases by 20 percent.

But the effect of cash payments made directly to girls versus parents had not been studied until now.

Support to girls ‘makes sense’

In Malawi, the researchers wanted to find out whether the monetary amount of the cash transfer would make a difference, and whether making the payment conditional on school attendance would have an additional impact. They also wanted to test whether making payments directly to girls would affect the outcome.

The study involved a sample of 3,805 girls and young women aged 13 to 22 in 176 urban and rural areas in Zomba, a highly populated district with high dropout rates and low educational attainment. According to a 2005 government survey, children drop out of school mainly due to financial hardship.

Of these girls, a randomly selected group of 1,225 were either offered stipends on the condition they attend school 80 percent of the time, or offered the same stipends unconditionally. The rest did not receive any offers and served as the comparison group for the study.

Girls getting the monthly stipend participated in a lottery where they picked a bottle cap out of an envelope to win an amount between $1 and $5 a month. Guardians were also randomly assigned a separate amount ranging from $4 to $10 a month. On average, girls received $3 and their parents $7, meaning that cash payments to both girls and guardians totalled an average of $10 a month, but ranged from $5-$15.

Each household received an informational sheet detailing the amounts and conditions of the offer, if there were any, and the contract was signed by the girl and her guardian.

Özler says that the condition to attend school at least 80 percent of the time did not seem to make a difference to schooling outcomes in Malawi, nor did increased total cash payments above the minimum of $5 per month. That’s in contrast to the CCT experience in Latin America, where the condition to attend school has been key to the programme’s success.

The girls, however, were demonstrably motivated by their stipends, which they mostly spent on personal items such as clothing.

“The study was successful in getting dropouts to come back to school and in keeping girls in school. Maybe it makes sense to directly support adolescent girls,” says Özler.

The researchers are now conducting follow-up tests and surveys in Malawi to assess, among other things, the impact of the programme on maths and reading skills.

The study was funded by the Global Development Network; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the World Bank’s Gender Action Plan, Knowledge for Change Trust Fund, World Development Report 2007 Small Grants Fund, Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund, and Research Group; and the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States.

photo caption. Credit:

It is critical that young people most-at-risk of HIV infection are better informed and equipped with skills to protect themselves. This was a key argument emerging from an international symposium convened to address the education sector’s response to the challenge of HIV among this key population.

Held in Berlin in early December, the meeting of the UNAIDS Inter-agency Task Team (IATT) on Education was hosted by German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). It brought together some 70 experts from around the world to discuss concrete ways forward to reach, with prevention messages, the most vulnerable young people already engaging in high-risk behaviour, such as multiple partnerships, inter-generational sex, unprotected male-to-male sex, sex work or injecting drug use.

Young people in general are especially vulnerable to the virus. According to the UNAIDS 2009 AIDS Epidemic Update, those aged 15-24 account for 40% of all new infections. This is exacerbated by the fact that only 40% of young people in the same age group have accurate knowledge about HIV and transmission. Helping youth avoid infection is seen as crucial for social and economic development, and providing them with AIDS-related knowledge and skills is a central concern of the UNAIDS IATT on Education.

Reaching those who have never been to school or who have dropped out early and left the formal education sector represents a particular challenge and the symposium examined a range of possible approaches to reach vulnerable adolescents and youth both in and out of school, looking at specifically targeted responses.

Ishita Chaudhry from the YP Foundation in India noted that while sexuality was a fundamental component of being human there was a failure to get basic information to young people to help protect them from HIV infection. “Why is sexuality so problematic?” she asked.

According to Dr Robert Carr, the Associate Director of the International Council of AIDS Service Organizations (ICASO) and keynote speaker, young people are too often “left to fend for themselves”, receiving inadequate preparation for their sexual and reproductive lives.

Fear, stigma and discrimination, laws and policies were identified as barriers to meeting the needs of those most vulnerable and ensuring their involvement in developing and implementing interventions. According to Els Klinkert, Senior Policy Adviser at UNAIDS, the “most-at-risk young people in low and concentrated epidemics are largely invisible”. This notion of invisibility was also invoked by Dr. Carr referring to gay and bisexual youth in the Caribbean. “Hidden behaviours” and limited frank discussions about these behaviours were seen to be problematic.

Symposium participants were able to review existing data on education sector approaches to HIV prevention; exchange ideas and experiences; and develop recommendations for outreach strategies that target young people in inclusive and gender-sensitive ways.

The sector was seen to play a role in multiple aspects of the response for most-at-risk young people. It was noted, firstly, that schools often extend farther into many communities than most public services – and have the potential to reach children and young people before they engage in most-at-risk behaviours. Secondly, good quality education that focuses on empowerment within safe and protective environments has a sustained impact on reducing vulnerability and behaviours that create, increase or perpetuate risk. Thirdly, comprehensive sexuality education – which addresses sexual and reproductive health, human rights, HIV prevention, gender, drugs and other aspects – was seen to equip learners with the necessary knowledge and skills to make informed decisions.

There was a shared understanding that young people should be at the heart of HIV programming, not just as passive recipients of information and services but as involved actors and that this is critical when developing and implementing HIV interventions. The statement issued by youth representatives at the meeting reinforced this point: “We demand the meaningful involvement of diverse youth communities, especially young people living with HIV as they are the key role models and leaders in the movement…We young people are here living, working, and ready to take responsibility along with your support and mentorship. We are not future leaders, we are leaders of today.”

Empowering young people to protect themselves from HIV is one of the nine priority focus areas for UNAIDS and its Cosponsors under the Joint action for results: UNAIDS outcome framework 2009-2011.

Formed in 2002, the IATT on Education is convened by UNESCO and brings together UNAIDS Cosponsors, bilateral agencies, private donors and civil society partners with the purpose of accelerating and improving a coordinated and harmonised education sector response to HIV.

(From L to R) Mark Richmond, UNESCO’s Global Coordinator on HIV and AIDS, Dr Mariangela Batista Galvao Simao, Director, Brazil National STD/AIDS Programme, Michel Sidibé, UNAIDS Executive Director, Elizabeth Mataka, member of the Global Advisory Group on Sexuality Education and the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa and Marijke Wijnroks, the AIDS ambassador for the Netherlands
Credit: UNAIDS/D.Bregnard

In many parts of the world, a combination of social taboos, unavailability of sound information, lack of resources and infrastructure make it difficult for children and young people to access sexuality education aimed at improving knowledge and reducing risk. This leaves many young people vulnerable to coercion, abuse, exploitation, unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.

According to the UNAIDS 2008 Global Report on the AIDS Epidemic, only 40% of young people aged 15-24 had accurate knowledge about HIV and transmission. It should come as no surprise that, against this background of insufficient levels of basic knowledge, young people aged 15-24 account for 40% of all new HIV infections (UNAIDS 2009 AIDS Epidemic Update).

In response to this challenge, the voluntary and non-mandatory International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education developed by UNESCO in partnership with UNAIDS, UNFPA, UNICEF and WHO seeks to assist education, health and other relevant authorities to develop and implement school-based sexuality education materials and programmes. The International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education is based on a rigorous review of evidence on sexuality education programmes and is aimed at education and health sector decision-makers and professionals.

Sexuality education can play a key role in improving knowledge and reducing sexual risk behaviours among young people. Equipped with better knowledge, information and skills, young people can be empowered to make informed decisions about sexual choices.

“If we are to make an impact on children and young people before they become sexually active, comprehensive sexuality education must become part of the formal school curriculum, delivered by well trained and supported teachers,” says Michel Sidibé, UNAIDS Executive Director. “Teachers remain trusted sources of knowledge and skills in all education systems and they are a highly valued resource in the education sector response to AIDS.”

The International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education was co-authored by leading experts in the field of sexuality education and subjected to extensive review and comment by a global panel of experts and practitioners from civil society organizations, ministries of education and international agencies. Volume I of the International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education focuses on the rationale for sexuality education and provides sound technical advice on characteristics of effective programmes. It is the outcome of a rigorous review of the literature on the impact of sexuality education and sexual behaviour, drawing upon 87 studies from around the world.

A companion document (Volume II) focuses on the topics and learning objectives to be covered in a ‘basic minimum package’ on sexuality education for children and young people from 5 to 18+ years of age and includes a bibliography of useful resources. It was informed by a review of curricula from 12 countries, as well as other international models.

“Numerous studies show that with the right information and skills, young people can change their behaviour to reduce the risk of acquiring HIV infection or passing it on to others,” says Mark Richmond, UNESCO’s Global Coordinator on HIV and AIDS and the Director for the Division for the Coordination of UN Priorities in Education. “At a minimum, HIV and AIDS education needs to include information on the HIV virus and its modes of transmission. At some point, HIV and AIDS education must introduce sex and relationships education - simply because over 75% of all HIV infections occur through sexual transmission.”

The UN organizations called on policy-makers to listen to young people, families, teachers and other practitioners, and use the International Technical Guidance to make sexuality education an integral part of the national response to the HIV pandemic.

UNESCO and its partners including UNAIDS, UNFPA, UNICEF and WHO, as well as a wide range of other partners, will support governments in operationalising the International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education at regional and country level. The two volumes of the International Technical Guidance will be published in all the six UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) as well as Portuguese.