HIV and AIDS Education in Emergencies

Advanced by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS)' Inter-Agency Task Team (IATT), this 2-page advocacy briefing note explores the role that HIV and AIDS education can play in preventing the rapid spread of HIV in post-conflict settings.

To begin, IATT outlines some recent statistics that illustrate the complex relationship between HIV/AIDS and humanitarian crisis. While calling for more rigourous research to enable site-specific analysis based on better quantitative data, IATT nonetheless identifies a number of conditions may increase vulnerability during conflict and post-conflict situations, such as:

• an increase in rape and sexual violence, including the use of rape as a weapon of war;
• severe impoverishment that often leaves women and girls with few alternatives but to exchange sex for survival;
• mass displacement that leads to the breakup of families and relocation into crowded refugee and internally displaced camps where security is rarely guaranteed;
• broken-down school, health, and communication systems usually used to programme against HIV transmission;
• limited access to condoms and treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STIs);
• removal of barriers to mobility and increase in cross-border trade and economic activity; and
• deep poverty, low levels of literacy, and rural-urban movements.

The key, according to IATT, is ensuring that post-conflict funding prioritises HIV and AIDS education, integrating this funding into existing planning instruments, strategic frameworks, and budgets and coordinating the educational initiative with others at the country, sub-national, and organisational levels. This HIV and AIDS education needs to be based on a curriculum designed for and adapted to the needs of the child. Further, in addition to prevention, IATT contends, this education should include aspects of care and treatment, and should support links to services that address psychosocial needs. Capacity-building is also emphasised so that both the education ministry and teachers are trained to deliver skills-based education and are equipped with teaching kits and aids. Meaningfully involving communities in programme development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation (M&E), and the development of tools for delivering HIV education. Specifically, returning refugee populations who were educated in camps can be key resources for HIV education activities, including as peer educators.

The document concludes with a number of questions to help planners apply these strategies in practice.