Evidence-based Guidelines for Youth Peer Education

Published by FHI 360, these guidelines are designed to support the development of new, high-quality peer education programmes for young people ages 10 to 24 years, or to improve existing programmes. According to FHI 360, peer education is a popular and versatile approach for promoting reproductive health and HIV prevention among young people around the world. Well-designed and well-implemented programmes can improve young people’s health-related knowledge, attitudes, and skills, as well as their access to health services. However, difficulty in recruiting and retaining peer educators, lack of community support, and poor training and supervision of peer educators can adversely affect a programme’s impact, and this publication has been produced to help address these. Although this publication focuses on peers working with young people to improve their sexual and reproductive health, these guidelines can be applied more broadly to other types of peer education programmes as well.

The guidelines provide recommendations on evidence-based youth peer education practices and a framework for quality assurance. It features cross-cutting issues relevant to all areas of a peer education programme and gives specific tips for the different phases of implementation, including planning, recruitment and retention of peer educators, supervision and management, and monitoring and evaluation. It also includes explanations of the available evidence on what works in peer education and real-world examples of how the guidelines are used in successful programmes.

The book includes the following contents:

• Peer Education Overview: This section defines peer education and its benefits, differentiates peer education from other peer-led approaches, discusses some of the challenges faced by programme managers and other peer education advocates, and briefly explains how research findings can help improve programmes.
• Guidelines: This section provides evidence-based guidelines, developed by worldwide experts, on how to run a successful youth peer education programme.
• Checklist and Action Planning Tool: This checklist can be used to plan a new peer education programme or to assess the extent to which an existing programme is implementing these guidelines.
• Annexes: Annexes provide a list of tools and publications on peer education.