Life Skills and Peer Education for 14,000 students

In October the International Blue Cross received a verbal commitment from a private donor to fund the School Awareness Creation Project in 2014. Together with the funds raised through Global Giving, this allowed us, in conjunction with the Blue Cross Namibia, to begin a new project development phase in late October 2013.

IFBC organized an exposure visit for Namibian project staff to Uganda in order to learn from existing well-established life skills interventions in the field of HIV/AIDs, for which the concept was originally developed. In partnership with the NGO ACET Uganda and a life skills expert, the team held sessions in theory and practice in several schools. The training was carried out to ensure a smooth transition from an awareness project to a fully-fledged life skills intervention in Namibia. 

2014-2016 will see a project phase with greater emphasis on peer education and community outreach. Peer education has proven to be a powerful means of preventing the use of drugs and alcohol among the youth in Namibia. A recent survey conducted in the high schools revealed that 69% of learners indicate that they will use the information learned to live a drug free life. By empowering high school students as peer educators with the capacity and knowledge to sustain the life skills education, Blue Cross Namibia staff will be able to expand the project to an additional 15+ schools over the next two years.

The head teacher from Immanuel Shifidi High School told us that “we are in a neighborhood where drugs are real; people sell drugs right across the street; some of the children’s parents are involved in the trade and many would like to see the school as a market.”  There is, therefore, the need for Blue Cross Namibia to complement the interventions in the high schools with a targeted community outreach program, which will focus on decreasing drug and alcohol use around the neighborhoods of the participating schools.

Links:

• Blue Cross Namibia website