Life Skills-based Education for HIV Prevention: a Critical Analysis

This 15-page paper from the UK Working Group on Education and HIV/AIDS, seeks to share the latest critical thinking and challenges faced in public health and education in respect to life skills education for HIV prevention. It summarises issues raised at a meeting held in London on May 17, 2004. The report examines the difficulty in defining life skills and how they should be taught in respect to pedagogy (or teaching.)

The report states that during the past decade the teaching of life skills to young people as an approach to HIV/AIDS education has developed more support. One of the goals behind the report is to find ways to incorporate life skills into the formal educational approaches often found in schools.

The report refers to the early 1990s as a time when the international development community recognised that "many young people (and adults) were not going to change their sexual behaviour merely because they were told that they should..." At this time the international development community (in particular, UNICEF) adopted the idea of teaching life skills as part of HIV/AIDS education.

The report describes a lack of commitment shown to life skills by national governments and the authors, Boler and Aggleton, suggest that this is in part because of the problems in definition and understanding. Boler and Aggleton further suggest that life skills approaches may also be perceived as donor-driven, meaning that many Ministries of Education may not give them sufficient priority in terms of policy development, capacity building or effective implementation.

Boler and Aggleton state that the sustainability of any change is inherently undermined by structural factors such as political will, economic development and gender norms. This leads to their suggestion that it is important to "target the individual in the short term while taking a longer-term perspective by tackling the collective."

According to the report, one of the larger difficulties of introducing life skills into the education system is the need to understand local realities and the context in which educational efforts are applied. While those working on these issues may be sensitive to the cultural considerations of the community and recognise the local structural constraints, Boler and Aggleton also point out that the real problem occurs when individuals may not have access to resources that help them change their lives.

The report states that the more common way to try to work with structural constraints encountered with HIV/AIDS is to "tackle issues of poverty, gender inequality, marginalisation... -...while working with the individual." The report suggests that future programmes and interventions should be based on theories that take the realities of young people’s lives, with all their complexities, as the
starting point.