Adolescents in post-conflict situations face many risks including HIV/AIDS and recruitment by fighting forces. Life skills training can add enormously to general education and provide support for emotional and social skills, particularly for HIV prevention and peace-building.

Effective education for HIV/AIDS prevention teaches medical facts but life skills are as important if not more so. Using role play and practice in a variety of risky situations, students develop negotiation skills that give them the confidence, for example, to avoid going to discos without reliable friends or to avoid unwanted or unprotected sex. Effective peace education includes negotiation and mediation skills in relation to conflict prevention and resolution at personal and community levels.

Life skills can change behaviour

In practice, education programmes for life skills, peace and HIV/AIDS prevention are often not well designed or implemented. They lack skilled teachers and time for monitoring what students learn. The life skills and peace education programme developed by UNHCR and its partners however - known as the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) Peace Education Programme - has shown good results, according to an evaluation study in 2002.

The programme sets out the skills to be learned each week, encourages learners to practise them in class and gives weekly, manageable, monitored homework in the school, home and community. Aimed at school children, young people and community groups, the INEE programme has been shown to change behaviour. In one case, young refugees who had attended the courses refused to join in a fight instigated by their elders, saying that they were peace education workers; no fight took place.

The principle of learning skills through regular manageable tasks also applies to life skills and HIV/AIDS education. If pupils are not learning skills, they are wasting their time. Successful programmes include learning the skills within dedicated timetabled classes such as civics, religious or social studies. External assessment shows, however, that in schools without specially trained and motivated teachers, these classes may not be regularly carried out, partly due to examination pressures, and independent skills lessons may be created solely for inspection purposes.

When skills are practised and learned on a regular basis, learners and teachers are enthusiastic: learners like doing something in class. Learning skills also teaches peer support and produces young conflict mediators and HIV peer facilitators. Young people welcome this kind of responsibility and their peers are keen to ask their advice.

The secret of a good skills programme, in addition to appropriate curriculum design, is high quality, ongoing teacher education, the input of a highly specialised trainer of international quality and a dedicated lesson each week.

Source(s):
'Never again: reconstruction of the education system in Rwanda', IIEP UNESCO, by Anna Obura, 2003
'Learning to live together: building skills, values and attitudes for the twenty-first century', IBE UNESCO, by Margaret Sinclair, 2004
'Peace education: why and how?' Forced Migration Review 22, by Pamela Baxter and Vick Ikobwa, January 2005

id21 Research Highlight: 11 August 2005

Further Information:
Anna Obura

Contact the contributor: aobura@africaonline.co.ke

Margaret Sinclair

Contact the contributor: margaret_sinclair@yahoo.com

Other related links:
'The impact of HIV/AIDS on education systems in the eastern and southern Africa region and the response of education systems to HIV/AIDS: life skills programmes' by UNICEF

Life skills and supplementary education programs, INEE

'Educating young people in emergencies: time to end the neglect', id21 insights education #4, August 2005

See id21's useful web links on educating young people in emergencies

'Make learning relevant, say young people'

'Post-primary education: time to deliver'

'Youth peace-building responds to inter-communal conflict'