Peer Education as a Strategy to Increase Contraceptive Prevalence and Reduce the Rate of STDs/AIDS a

Excerpts from the report follow:

The effects of IRESCO's "Among Youth" project on adolescent reproductive health in Cameroon were generally positive. The results presented in this report show that adolescents in Mokolo, more often than their counterparts in New Bell, adopted behavioral changes to prevent STIs/HIV transmission and unwanted pregnancies as a result of the intervention.

Adolescents in both the control and intervention sites have high levels of knowledge regarding HIV/AIDS prevention methods, but their behaviors do not always reflect this knowledge. Condom use remains insufficient. Fidelity and abstinence were known prevention methods, but condom use with commercial and occasional partners remains inconsistent in over half of adolescents in the intervention area. Many adolescents say that they do not use condoms because they are confident their partner is healthy. However, the portion of respondents in the intervention site who used a condom during their last sexual encounter with a commercial partner went up significantly after the intervention.

Further efforts must be made to make condoms more accessible to youth. In the two sites targeted in this study, about one out of three adolescents did not know where to obtain condoms within a 10-minute walk of their home. In general, fewer girls than boys know where condoms are available.

Most urban Cameroonian adolescents are exposed to reproductive health messages through mass media channels. In total an estimated 200,000 adolescents received reproductive health information directly through IRESCO's "Among Youth" campaign. But hearing the messages alone does not necessarily result in behavior change. Peer education combined with mass media campaigns form an important strategy for targeting youth with reproductive health and family planning messages. After the social marketing project was implemented, through direct peer to peer communication efforts, sporting events, informational kiosks and video screenings and discussions, researchers found that the control and intervention groups had similar levels of knowledge, but larger behavioral changes were observed among youth in the intervention site. We attribute these changes to the peer education outreach efforts, which emphasized interpersonal communication and reinforced the reproductive health messages adolescents received from mass media including IRESCO's magazine. Peer education efforts, discussions, and IEC materials can help adolescents translate knowledge into healthy lifestyles. Integration of reproductive health messages into popular youth activities, such as sports and cultural events, was also found to be a successful strategy for reinforcing messages and discussing sensitive issues affecting adolescents' lives in greater depth.

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Source:

Emails from Laura Raney to the Communication Initiative on September 25 and December 4 2003; and Operations Research summary on the FRONTIERS website.