Meu Futuro e Minha Escolha (My Future is My Choice)

MFMC is based on the notion that, with appropriate training, youth can be guided to provide younger children with life skills to help them make informed choices about their sexual behaviour. Organisers opted to address children - who are mostly too young to be sexually active, and therefore represent a "window of opportunity" in stemming the spread of the epidemic if they can be protected from HIV infection. The peer educators explain in simple ways to children what HIV/AIDS is, encouraging them to ask questions when they don't understand.

To prepare peer educators for this work, the national master training team offered a 10-day, face-to-face training programme for the 25 youth. Following this process, educators and their "pupils" are engaged through entertaining approaches offered through the social clubs that are supported by the initiative. In the clubs, they learn skills like basket weaving, play sports, and practice dramas about HIV/AIDS, which they perform in various communities.

The training of MFMC peer educators - and their ensuing communication with younger children - aims at linking young people to health services. Efforts are made to ensure that participants know where clinics are and what services are offered, as well as how they can eventually participate in the provision of these services. Connecting peer educators to Youth Friendly Health Services (YFHS) is a project priority. UNICEF - in partnership with the National AIDS Council (CNCS) provincial nucleus - facilitates discussions between the Provincial Directorate of Health and the Provincial Directorate of Youth and Sport and subsequently between the District Directorates of Health and Youth and Sport to strengthen these connections.

HIV/AIDS, Children, Youth.

The project aims to:

• provide young people with facts about sexual health, pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS;
• offer youth the skills to delay sexual intercourse;
• improve communication between boys and girls, and between friends, young people, their parents, and their community;
• provide young people with the skills to make informed decisions about their sexual health; and
• provide young people with the information and skills to face peer pressure around the use of alcohol and drugs.

The programme forms part of 'Telling the Story', a youth campaign funded by the United Nations Foundation, which sponsors youth projects in seven AIDS-affected countries in southern Africa.