Girls' Education and HIV Prevention

Advanced by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS)' Inter-Agency Task Team (IATT), this 2-page advocacy briefing note addresses the centrality of educating girls to HIV prevention worldwide.

The note opens with statistics designed to give context and explain the motivation for stepping up efforts to achieve the Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). For example, a 2006 ActionAid International study indicates that girls who had completed secondary education had a lower risk of HIV infection and practised safer sex than girls who had only finished primary education. This may be due to the finding that, for every additional year in school, girls are better equipped to make decisions affecting their sexual behaviour and have higher earning potential (factors that have been proven to substantially lower the risk of HIV infection). Despite these recognised benefits, however, "[i]f current trends continue unchanged, only 18 out of 113 countries that missed the...gender parity goal at primary and secondary level in 2005 stand a chance of achieving it by 2015."

Based on such data, IATT stresses that it is crucial to take concrete steps to get more girls into school. Many of the advocacy strategies outlined in the document centre around financial incentives and/or support - examples include abolishing school fees, expanding funding for the EFA Fast Track Initiative (FTI), strengthening school feeding and nutrition programmes, and implementing targeted financial mechanisms (e.g., a programme in Mexico that paid a monthly stipend, if children regularly attended school and family members visited clinics for nutrition and hygiene education, improved girls' school enrolment from 67% to 75%). Some of the communication-oriented strategies IATT proposes include:

• Providing comprehensive sexual health education with a special focus on HIV and family planning: "Promoting condoms is a message that is working and should be encouraged."
• Offering skills-based HIV and AIDS education that tackles broader factors that make girls particularly vulnerable: "Analysing customs and gender roles, questioning myths and stereotypes as well as receiving accurate information are powerful tools in HIV prevention."
• Taking steps to create child-friendly schools that foster gender equality, promote positive role models, challenge negative gender stereotyping, provide a safe school environment for girls, and offer flexible class schedules (to help reach girls who may otherwise miss school because they are caring for ill family members or working to supplement the household income).
• Developing nonformal education programmes that ensure basic literacy, numeracy, and life skills for girls and young women outside of formal school systems and transition them back into schools through equivalency or "second chance" programmes.

In short, "education systems must be transformed to challenge gender stereotypes, train girls in skills to enhance their economic opportunities, reinforce girls' participation and empowerment and promote knowledge and skills related to their sexual and reproductive health and rights."