In this issue:
Website of the month
EI Campaigns
Affiliate's Activities
General News
Three Questions to...Astrid MacDonald and Meta Mangre

On World AIDS Day show your commitment to fighting HIV and AIDS by organising awareness raising activities at your unions, in the classroom and out on the streets! The theme designated by the World AIDS Campaign for this year is ‘accountability’ - urging governments and international agencies to ‘Stop AIDS - Keep the Promise’.

In other words, all governments who signed the 2001 UN General Assembly Declaration of Commitment should keep their promise to allocate more funds and to reduce the expansion of the pandemic. Although more funding has been raised since 2001, overall progress to combat AIDS has been limited. In short, the promise has not been kept. EI is calling upon you to do your bit to ensure that it is!

To support your World AIDS Day activities, EI has already distributed World AIDS Day materials in the form of stickers and posters to all affiliated teachers’ unions. These materials emphasise the need to ‘Educate for Life’, to use education as a social vaccine against AIDS. Secondly EI has worked with its Dutch affiliates the AOB and OCNV to produce a World AIDS Day flyer outlining how to highlight HIV and AIDS in your school. The flyer can be downloaded here.

The document highlights the importance of quality education as the best social vaccine against HIV and AIDS and offers a series of suggestions as to how HIV and AIDS may be raised in the classroom setting. You can download the flyer as well as other campaign materials and information on our World AIDS Day website. For more information contact us.

Honduras has the highest HIV infection rate in Latin America and is also one of the countries which is part of the Fast Track Initiative (FTI) in support of achieving the Education for All (EFA) goals. Early in October, Education International and the Education Development Center met with all five Honduran teachers’ unions in the country to discuss the feasibility of future cooperation within the EFAIDS Programme.

Thanks to the excellent support of Rosario Avila de Dominguez, member of the EI Executive Board representing the Latin American Region, the five teachers unions agreed to develop a common agenda and work out a joint plan of action.

At the meeting they noted the challenges that both EFA and HIV represent to the teaching community and the strong input that is needed from the teachers unions in response. The unions will take their policy decisions at their respective congresses in December which will lead to the inclusion of the Honduran unions in the 2007 EFAIDS Programme. For more information, please contact us.

In Cote d’Ivoire, IESCI (Education International Cote d’Ivoire Section) has been busy training union staff. Most recently 22 staff members extended their training on HIV and AIDS and EFA and in the specific task areas of advocacy and monitoring and evaluation.

Furthermore 26 different training sessions took place in 13 cities across the country, building the capacities of the participants in the field of HIV prevention and the promotion of Education for All. Research has also been carried out on the mortality rate of teachers who succumbed to the virus and the subsequent impact on schools in two regions of the country. For more information, please contact us.

A huge leap forward was made in the expansion of the EFAIDS Programme in the Caribbean in October. Representatives of ten Caribbean teachers’ unions met in St. Lucia to carry out training on the WHO Teachers’ Exercise Books for HIV Prevention and to discuss the next steps forward in promoting quality Education for All in the region. As a result the twenty teachers who received the training will each act as master trainers in their own countries, spreading the training throughout the teaching communities there. The unions now have ambitious plans to train their colleagues as well as to advocate on the teaching of HIV and AIDS in their schools.

Secondly, it was noted that although free primary EFA has generally been achieved in the Caribbean, the provision of quality EFA remains a big challenge. The discussion which followed centred on issues specific to the Caribbean region such as teacher migration, literacy, the recruitment of untrained teachers and the establishment of maximum class sizes. It is expected that these issues will be discussed at the upcoming Commonwealth Education Ministers Meeting in South Africa this December. For the first time ever, a Teachers’ Forum is to be held at this event to inform the Ministers’ debate. For more information, please contact us.

In Zimbabwe EI affiliate ZIMTA (Zimbabwe Teachers' Association) carried out a training session with master trainers and the National Executive Committee in August. The purpose of the workshop was to update Master Trainers on issues relating to Education for All and how to integrate it into their training sessions. The trainers and other provincial officials and staff present were able to come out with a first draft of the ZIMTA EFA policy.

ZIMTA has a well established structure for the implementation of the EFAIDS Programme. In the earlier project, master trainers were put in place and used to train conveners who in turn went to the schools and established HIV/AIDS study circles. Through this arrangement 1,983 facilitators have been trained to date.

As a result AIDS action clubs in schools were established and master trainers have been invited to facilitate in local and international workshops. ZIMTA has also been able to interact with persons who have openly declared they are living with HIV/AIDS. For more information, please contact us.

Last month CTERA (Confederation of Argentine Teachers) celebrated the adoption of a new law which will see sex education on the curriculum at public and private schools all over Argentina.

In a letter to the President of the Senate, Hugo Yasky, General Secretary of CTERA noted that the issue of establishing sex education in schools had been an historic demand of the union and other organisations involved in the struggle for gender equality, health and reproductive rights. He said that a holistic approach to education requires that no aspect of human life be left out of the curriculum. Furthermore he welcomed the new law as an opportunity to tackle serious problems such as gender-specific violence, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and child prostitution.

The Argentine Society for Paediatric and Adolescent Gynaecology recently carried out a study which demonstrated that 34% of surveyed female teenagers did not use any contraception the first time they had intercourse. It is hoped that the new law will go some way to reversing this trend, to promoting sexual health and to preventing the spread of HIV and AIDS. For more information, please contact us.

UNESCO has just released the UN Agencies annual update on Education for All worldwide. The report features a wide range of useful information on progress towards achieving the EFA goals by 2015. Likewise the entire back section of the book consists of tables of indicators on a country-by-country basis, a resource which can be drawn upon by teachers’ unions to back up discussions with their governments on EFA.

The Royal Academy of Health in Belgium (De Koninklijke Academie voor Geneeskunde van België) is holding an AIDS symposium entitled “AIDS in the Third World" in Brussels on Saturday November 25.

Speakers will include academicians from the Universities of Amsterdam, Ghent and Leuven and the event will be convened by Prof. Dr. Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS. For more information, please contact the Academy at academiegeneeskunde@vlaanderen.be.

UNAIDS has issued a statement indicating that an estimated 18 million African children will be orphaned by AIDS by the end of the decade if more is not done to combat the pandemic among the continent's young population.

This deplorable state of affairs regarding orphans has massive implications for progress in education as well as in the development of countries as a whole.

Children orphaned by AIDS are far less likely to get the chance to go to school and are set off on a path towards social marginalisation and vulnerability to abuse, poverty and disease. Against this backdrop, UNICEF studies show that a mere one percent of pregnant women and children infected with HIV receive antiretrovirals in West and Central Africa. This is a far cry from the 2010 target of 80 percent. For more information, please contact us.

“ Health and Family Life Education (HFLE) is a Ministry of Education Programme which is also known as the ‘Basic Life Skills Programme’ in Suriname. HFLE is different to EFAIDS in that it focuses on the learner as the beneficiary of the training. Furthermore it consists of three specific strands, namely, health and HIV/AIDS, interpersonal relations and the environment.

BvL has been cooperating with the government to ensure that our own efforts within the framework of the EFAIDS programme can complement those of the Government on HFLE. Discussions are ongoing, but it is likely that in the near future BvL will be covering the HIV/AIDS component of HFLE in secondary schools and higher level. ”

“ Quite positively. The union has been busy lobbying the Minister of Education to gain more capacity to sustain the training. We have asked him to authorise six full-time coordinators from the teaching community and he has agreed so far, at least in principle. He is also in agreement with the provision of in-service training on HIV/AIDS during school time. As regards the curriculum, the aim of the BvL would be to mainstream HIV into every school subject possible. We are positive about the potential to receive support for this. ”

“ It features a lot of practical exercises based on situations that are recognisable in Suriname. Also it is very much interactive and the lessons on basic life skills are very useful. We now plan to start translating it in to Dutch to widen its scope for use.

As to improvements, we would suggest that the book should make a clear statement on the importance of allowing the recipients of training to make up their own minds on certain issues. Teachers should not be there to impose their own values on learners. Rather they should teach the facts and remain impartial. ”