Street Children and HIV and AIDS: Methodological Guide for Facilitators

This training guide focuses on street children, their risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, and prevention of risk behaviours. Written by field practitioners and experts on guidance and counselling of youth in West Africa, it is structured to be a training tool to assist facilitators in the field. Its format and organisation emphasise portability and functionality and include tools to measure the effectiveness of the facilitators' interventions.

Prior to offering the training materials, the guide describes its own conceptualisation and writing. It includes its focus on street children and who they are, the three phases of the project of elaborating a training guide with field-tested methods, and the role of a sub-regional seminar in Niamey for the training of facilitators in 2005.

Next, it sets forth the training proposal for facilitators used as the basis for creating the guide, including two strategies for acting on risk behaviours - increasing the children's level of knowledge of risk and developing their capacities to apply that knowledge; the theory of facilitating learning by understanding how street children think and how to motivate them to act; and a five-step approach for facilitators, which becomes the training tool when information and activities are added in the third section.

The third section elaborates the five steps of training:

1. Understand the characteristics of the children - including a table breaking down the differences between, for example, new arrivals to the streets and children in gangs, and listing intervention objectives, strategic approaches, and intervention tools specific to each group.
2. Have the necessary knowledge of information and prevention regarding HIV & AIDS - including HIV & AIDS and sexually transmitted infection (STI) messages to be conveyed, as well as the intervention tools suitable to convey them.
3. Have the capacities to provide continued and effective action - including a facilitator profile to identify whom to train and how to recruit and train them.
4. Have the techniques to enable the children to appropriate the knowledge and values conveyed to them - including intervention techniques, beginning with listening and proceeding to activities designed for the streets.
5. Evaluate the impact of the intervention in order to improve its effectiveness - including the tools of assessment for the evaluating the organisation, the facilitator, and the action/intervention.

In conclusion, the guide is a practitioner-designed training document resulting from a collaborative partnership among HIV/AIDS interventionists from the following African countries: Burkina Faso, Cote D'Ivoire, Mali, Cameroon, Niger, and Senegal.