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African development action with informed and engaged societies
Soul Beat Africa
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Impact Data - AIDSWEB Project

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Date
Methodologies
A 9-question survey was administered to students and teachers - 142 in intervention (participant) schools and 219 in control (non-participant) schools. Interviews were conducted with AIDSWEB collaborators, staff, and consultants to gather qualitative data.

Data was collected from Botswana, Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. (Schools from Nigeria, Zambia and the USA have also participated in the AIDSWEB project, but were not evaluated here).
Knowledge Shifts
AIDSWEB students were almost twice as likely to correctly identify all 4 methods of AIDS prevention and transmission. These results were consistent across countries, except for Uganda (a country that, according to evaluators, has well-established programmes in HIV/AIDS education and youth development).
Practices
63% in the control group and 85% of the intervention group responded that they helped their communities by sharing information about HIV/AIDS with family, friends, and/or health workers about HIV/AIDS; volunteering with local organisations or health clinics/hospitals; or developing a social action plan. AIDSWEB students were similar to students outside the programme in their choices of social action, but AIDSWEB students were more than twice as likely to develop social action plans.
Access
AIDSWEB currently serves approximately 500 youth in 70 schools in 8 African countries.

Students who were not in the programme were almost 6 times more likely to have less than 1 hour of computer access in the previous month. In the intervention group, 51% reported having more than 4 hours of computer access in the previous month compared to 23% in the control group. In the previous month, 35% of control respondents reported no computer access; 6% in the intervention group reported no access.

AIDSWEB enabled computer and Internet access for a greater percentage of boys than girls. 2% of the boys in AIDSWEB schools had no access to the computer, as compared to 30% of boys in non-participant schools. 11% of girls in the AIDSWEB programme had no computer access, as compared to 38% of girls in non-participant schools.

Most of the students (85%) accessed the Internet and AIDSWEB information alongside others (in student groups, with their teacher, or in AIDS clubs), while only 15% accessed it alone.
Source
"Evaluation Report of WBIHD's ICT for Education AIDSWEB Project" (prepared by ENCOMPASS LLC, November 23, 2002), forwarded by Anthony Bloome to The Communication Initiative on February 24, 2003; and "AIDSWEB: HIV/AIDS and ICT Project Update (Winter 2003): ICT for Education Program World Bank Institute Human Development Division (WBIHD)", posted by Anthony Bloome to the Global Knowledge Development list server on February 20, 2003.