Kenya: Girl Guides to Train One Million HIV/AIDS Educators

A million Girl Guide peer educators will be trained by 2004 in an ambitious program to fight AIDS in Kenya. The Kenya Girl Guides Association national chair, Honorine Kiplagat, said so far, 25,000 educators had been trained under its Peer Education Program. The government, through Health Minister Sam Ongeri, pledged to support the project's implementation. Ongeri promised the government would assist the association, whose membership includes young girls and women ages 18 to 30, access funding from external donors for its war against AIDS.

Ongeri challenged the association to hit its target of 1 million peer educators a year earlier and pledged both human and material support from the ministry. The ministry would give technical advice on health-related issues of HIV/AIDS, voluntary counseling and testing, prevention of mother-to-child transmission and care for those infected. The minister said that girls and women ages 15 to 24 who are sexually active are twice as likely to be infected as males of the same age.

The weeklong training program, which started Wednesday, is dubbed the first youth leadership forum on HIV/AIDS for Girl Guides from Africa. Its theme is "Empowering African Young Women." Guides representing 28 countries will be educated on various HIV/AIDS issues, gaining knowledge they are expected to pass on to their youth peers.

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