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MYSA Kicking AIDS Out Activities takes schools by storm 
 
 
7/7/2011 
Edwin Wasonga 
''We are hopeful that the Kicking AIDS Out clubs in schools will positively influence the lives of thousand students,identifying best practices to illustrate positive impact on behavior change amongst the students''
MYSA HIV prevention Programme has been running its activities for the past 16 years with the main aim of promoting behavioral change among young people and members of the community by integrating sport skills and life skills through peer education, Kicking AIDS Out drills, peer counseling and other cultural and recreational activities. Our target group has been the adolescent youth in school and out of school. Late last year, the Programme conducted a mapping exercise and learnt different lessons. Some of the lesson that we learned are; the number of organizations working with schools in the field of ASRH and HIV and AIDS has increased, therefore there has also been an increase of the number of youth students in schools, which results in increasing demand for ASRH and HIV and AIDS information and education, Since young people are very vulnerable and they need assistance and guidance for their future development. We also learned that there was a huge gap in terms of ownership since most of the Health talk sessions were carried out by MYSA trained Peer Leaders hence the schools being more dependent to MYSA. The schools felt that there is need to train their students and teachers as Peer Leaders on HIV and AIDS and Reproductive Health issues in order to reach out to a bigger audience with information on HIV and AIDS. We were able to draw lessons from the mapping exercise and initiated a pilot project in four community secondary schools to bridge the identified gaps by training High school student as Peer Leaders, with the main aim of enabling the trained Peer Leaders to run their school Health talk activities independently and subsequently form Active Kicking AIDS Out club in schools where they can share information with their peers since peer groups are highly influential and young people are more likely to accept information from peers than adults. Moreover, Peer leaders themselves experience positive benefits by attaining knowledge and leadership skills for their own professional development The implementation process and the trainings for the schools club members was officially held at MYSA community center from 4th – 15th April, 2011 where we had parallel trainings. Each school had a representation of 15 students and one teacher, in total 60 students and four teachers were trained as Peer Leaders. The trainings were conducted by 3 trained MYSA Leader Level 1s and they were supported by 3 trained Leader Level 2s as co- facilitators, participants were also awarded with certificates of participation after successfully completing the training. Out target is to conduct four more trainings for four other community schools in August, 2011 and in the long-run train and set up at least one active Kicking AIDS Out Club in 16 schools, one in each zone by 2012, this will however help to further strengthen the schools outreach activities. MYSA will further give technical support to the clubs and mentor the trained Peer Leaders in schools during the Kicking AIDS Out activities. The four schools which were trained have already started implementing their one month work plans that they developed during the trainings and applying the knowledge they recently acquired “We are hopeful that the Kicking AIDS Out club in schools will positively influence the lives of thousand students and continue identifying best practices to illustrate positive impact on behavior change amongst the students”
 
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