Peer Education

Dear all,
Greetings! And welcome to the first of many Technical eUpdates! The eUpdates are designed to provide you with a brief summary of a technical themes or concepts related to HIV and WASH programs. Each update will be accompanied by relevant manuals, guidelines, toolkits or other resources that can be downloaded and applied to strengthened your program work. Over time these resources will help your organizations to establish a diverse electronic library of technical materials that strengthen different areas of your programs in Both HIV and WASH. I encourage you to use these in the following ways:

• Circulate these emails within your organization to relevant staff members for their learning purposes
• Save the attached materials on a computer which is accessible to all staff organized by theme or topic.
• Use the various resources to improve training curriculum, inform program design processes and accompany staff as job guides or other supporting tools

This 1st issue of the eUpdate is dedicated to Peer Education:

Mitigating HIV/AIDS is a balancing act between providing services to those affected and infected, as well as building the capacity of caregivers and the community to sustain long-term responses. As many of you already know (and are doing), one of the most common methods to facilitate this is by engaging peer educators in your program work! Peer education is a process of carrying out informal or organized educational activities with individuals or small groups of peers, over a period of time. Its success is attributed to being community based, culturally appropriate, economically effective and enabling for marginalized or high-risk groups to be reached – primarily because the educators share the same life experience as that of the people they are reaching.

Although peer education was developed in the context of HIV/AIDS programming, many of the concepts around peer counseling, training and outreach are transferrable to different kinds of community development. The key too effective peer-education programs is making sure that the peer educators themselves are well equipped with qualified and relevant information as well, with the skill to know how best to communicate that information to their audience to be received and adapted. This Technical eUpdate provides you with resources for you to use for your training programs – both for your program staff/volunteers and for the beneficiaries you serve. These resources provide a mix of workshop guides, curricula and quality assurance checklists that can support the operations of your programs. They are individually attached to this email for easier download.

1. Standards for Peer Education Programs:

   This guide provides a basic reference and guidance tool for program managers, supervisors, trainers, and peer educators themselves. The standards of practice provides a checklist with definitions of the minimum essential elements that should be considered or present in HIV peer-education programs from planning through moniotoring and evaluation stages of the project cycle. The Standards can also provide you with a quick-assessment of the comprehensiveness of your peer-education activities that your organizations are implementing, and highlight the gaps that need to be filled according to these internationally developed best practices.
   Click here to download PDF.
   

2. Peer Education: Outreach, Communication & Negotiation:

   This training manual describes ways in which NGOs may design and implement strategies and work-plans for peer education, as part of comprehensive sexual health interventions. This manual includes technical content for training of peer educators as well. This manual was developed by the Alliance in India.
   Click here to download PDF.
   

3. Guide for Implementing TAP (Teens for AIDS Prevention):

   This particular manual is a youth and school based peer-education program guide that has similar components to the above documents regarding the steps and components needed for a peer-education program.
   However, it goes further and contains more than 150 pages of discussion guides, games and teaching aides that youth educators can use to facilitate HIV and STI prevention education with other youth. For those of you working with other populations apart from youth, these tools can be easily adopted to be more relevant for the communities you work with as well!
   Click here to download PDF.
   

More to come!