Scaling Up HIV/AIDS Prevention Activities

Changemaker: Kolawole Orewola

Scaling Up HIV/AIDS Prevention In Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria was designed to scale up HIV prevention activities among out of school young people with disabilities and non young people with disabilities through strengthened Family Life and HIV Education implementation.

Education (FLHE) to encourage behavioural change through the steps of building the target audiences’ knowledge on Sexual Reproductive Health including HIV&AIDS. This will be done through training of young people with disabilities as a peer educator who will regularly deliver FLHE using both community theatre and outreaches. This will assist the target group to adopt behaviours that decrease their vulnerability to HIV. Their skills will be enhanced to practice the adopted positive behaviour through training on life skills, peer education and condom use. The peer educators will act as advocates and reach out to their peers with correct information on HIV, life skills and refer their peers appropriately to access Voluntary Counselling and Testing Services in already identified service centres.

Identification of Voluntary Counselling Testing centres for referral- where two testing centres in Ibadan North Local Government area and Ibadan South East Local Government are – were identified for the project and they are very close to the areas where community mobilisation will be conducted later on the project.

Baseline survey- knowledge, attitude and behaviour assessment was conducted from 19th to 21st of October 2009. The assessment was conducted to examine the knowledge of out of school young people with disabilities and non disability as regards HIV/AIDS, identify their needs so that the training can be designed to meet those needs and respond questions that may be agitating the minds of the target audience. Both quantitative (semi-structured questioners) and qualitative (focus group discussions) methods were used to elicit information from the target audience. Findings from the questionnaire survey revealed that although the majority of (98%) of the audience are aware of HIV/AIDS, there are knowledge gaps that need to be filled. None of the respondents could correctly define the acronym ‘HIV’ and less than half (47%) of them knew that it is impossible to tell if a person is infected by mere looking. Several misconceptions about HIV transmission and prevention existed among them and only a third of them knew they could access HIV Counselling Testing (HCT) services. Moreover, the focus group discussions revealed that their perceived susceptibility to HIV infection was low and that many do not have opportunities to ask questions when they need clarification about HIV-AIDS.