Education et VIH/Sida

Education and HIV/AIDS

The fight against AIDS is one of the Millennium Development Goals and is crucial to the achievement of universal primary education. This pandemic poses problems for education supply due to the devastating effect it has on teaching staff and education demand with children left orphaned.

In 2003 it was estimated that 40 million people worldwide were living with AIDS, with 5 million new infections a year and 3 million deaths.

The impact of HIV/AIDS on education

HIV/AIDS affects several areas of the education system:

teachers: the virus has severely affected teachers leading to a rise in mortality rates and absenteeism.
children: the school dropout rate is higher on average for orphans and care policies lead to additional efforts and costs.
education system management: planning for replacement teachers and new training programmes is rarely integrated into the management of education systems.
cost of the education service: additional costs must be provided for to replace teachers, for additional training and to implement prevention policies.
quality of teaching: teacher replacements and reduced school hours due to absenteeism lower thequality of education.

The impact of education policies on HIV/AIDS

Prevention must take place in school by integrating HIV/AIDS into the syllabus and promoting peer education. Prevention actions give basic knowledge about the virus, protection methods and how to adopt practices and behaviour and also promote safer habits for young adolescents who are not yet sexually active.

More generally, it can be noted that raising the level of education creates a kind of “social vaccine” and reduces a country’s HIV/AIDS prevalence. However, it has also been observed that the risk from AIDS is higher in richer and more educated social classes.

One of the goals of education policies is to mitigate the effects of HIV/AIDS on education supply. By improving management systems countries could have a more accurate picture of the number of teachers affected and the subsequent replacement needs and therefore raise their planning capacity.

Education supply must be supported in order to allow orphans to complete their schooling. Similarly, the economic capacity of a family falls sharply when it is affected by the AIDS virus and its perception of the profitability of education falls. Financial constraints weaken demand which must therefore be actively supported.

Actions and financing to combat HIV/AIDS in education

TheDakar forum created an action framework linking the problematics of health and education: FRESH (Focusing Resources on Effective School Health). It defines four points which must be integrated into Education For All processes:

A health and nutrition policy at school
Access to drinking water and separate latrines for girls at school
Education programmes to develop basic knowledge and safe practices
Services to improve health and nutrition in school

UNAIDS’ Inter Agency Task Team coordinates actions for this with a mission to harmonise efforts and support the implementation of the FRESH framework.

Efforts to fight AIDS raise the estimated cost of reaching Education For All by $975 million a year. The two main sources of financing for this are the Fast-Track initiative for education and the Global Fund to fight AIDS. AFD participates in these efforts as a donor in the Fast-Track initiative.