Работники сектора образования

The education sector is critical to HIV prevention for young people and can also play a vital role in support for orphans and vulnerable children affected by HIV. Simply ensuring young people’s access to school or other educational opportunities is an important aspect of HIV prevention, as higher levels of education associated with safer sexual behaviours and delayed sexual debut. School attendance also provides students the benefits of school-based sexuality education and HIV prevention programming. And schools provide a source of social protection for children in general, including children infected or affected by AIDS.

However, the HIV epidemic is having a serious impact on education systems in many of the hardest-hit countries, key factor being the loss of teachers and other education professionals to the disease in their most productive years.

Mitigating the impact of HIV on the education sector entails a number of priority actions. These include ensuring that HIV is addressed at every level of the education sector and that capacity is built within the sector. The international community has initiated a number of initiatives such as the ‘Education for All—Fast Track Initiative’ to accelerate progress towards quality primary education by facilitating financial support to low-income countries.

Strengthening school systems to meet the pressures posed by HIV and other problems must be based on evidence of the actual conditions in the education sector in order to apply scarce resources. A recent study of 71 countries by the UNAIDS Inter-Agency Task Team on Education found that three-quarters of the responding countries had established management structures dedicated to coordinating the response of ministries of education to the epidemic. However, only 59% of these structures had a dedicated budget, calling into question their effectiveness.

Cooperation between education systems and social protection initiatives provides opportunities for improving the effectiveness of both and enhances the capacity of schools to support children affected by HIV. In Namibia, for example, a project in the school system to enhance the involvement of local school board members in improving schools collaborated with a social protection project that creates “circles of support” for orphans and other vulnerable children. By working together, the projects avoided working at cross purposes and helped participating schools assist children made vulnerable by HIV to stay in school.

But more work needs to be done, especially to understand the extent of HIV infection among educators, and to develop responsive programs. South Africa is one of the few countries that has done a sero-survey to estimate HIV prevalence among teachers. The research documented that teachers are at no lower HIV risk than the general population, indicating that they could benefit from targeted interventions. Pilot interventions for teachers have been implemented in Kenya and Zambia.