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Reducing the school dropout rate for girls in Kenya and providing passable HIV/AIDS and sex education could boil down HIV incidence in the country, experts said of late, IRIN News reports. Rosemarie Muganda-Onyando -- executive manager of the Centre for the Study of Adolescence in Nairobi, Kenya -- said, "Young people do not have the information they need, and the dropout charge per unit, particularly for girls, is still too high." She added, "Dropping out of school ensures a life of impoverishment for these girls, and many of them besides wind up HIV-positive because the male-female power dynamics become regular more sloping against them."
In 2003, Kenya introduced no-cost primary school education, simply an estimated one jillion school-age children still are not attending school. In addition, up to 13,000 Kenyan girls drop out of school p.a. as a result of pregnancy, and about 17% of girls have had sex in front age 15. HIV prevalence among Kenyan women between ages 15 and 24 is virtually 5%, compared with 1% for their male counterparts, IRIN News reports. According to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey of 2004, enlightened girls were less likely to marry early and more likely to practice family planning. In summation, their children had a higher endurance rate. UNICEF also found that uneducated girls ar more likely to contract HIV, compared with girls who have had some schooling.
Kenya's Ministry of Education has an HIV/AIDS prevention and sexual urge education course of study, but no specific classroom time is set aside for it, which leaves schools and teachers to fit the subject in at their discretion. In addition, schools in outback, rural areas, as well as low-income urban areas, often do not have the resources or counselling to learn sex education. Christopher Barassa -- principal of Genesis Joy Primary and Secondary School in Mathare, Nairobi's second largest slum -- said that the school does non "have sexual urge education or HIV education" because the government has not provided any material or grooming. Muganda-Onyando said, "Not enough teachers have been trained for this type of education, so children ar leaving schoolhouse with academic qualifications and not many life skills." She added, "One of the large problems has been the breakdown of our traditional African systems, where an aunt or grandmother was responsible for sex education ... people say discussions about sex are taboo in Africa, only this is not true. We deep in thought those systems through colonisation and modernization, and they haven't been replaced."
According to IRIN News, CSA runs programs aimed at lowering the dropout rate for girls by didactics them about sexual and reproductive health, including HIV. "The projects train teachers to bestow life skills, create safe spaces in schools where girls fanny freely discourse the issues they ar facing and foster mentor-protege relationships betwixt older and younger students, so the younger ones have somewhere to call on," Muganda-Onyando said. The first step has been implemented in more than 100 schools in Kenya and has had positivistic results so far, IRIN News reports (IRIN News, 7/25).
Reprinted with tolerant permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You throne view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.
