Building a Gender Friendly School Environment

Effectively addressing AIDS in Africa and other developing countries requires strategies that go beyond HIV prevention basics, such as consistently using a condom. This kind of prevention education by itself will have limited success if the culture supports traditional gender roles in which men are dominant and women are expected to be submissive and dependent. When women lack the power to refuse sex or negotiate safer sex options, their vulnerability to contracting HIV increases.

Schools play an important part in teaching, modeling, and reinforcing gender roles. To tackle HIV on this front, HHD has developed an intervention that examines the different elements of the school environment that define gender roles and establish gender equality.

“The most striking manifestations of gender inequalities are sexual harassment and violence,” says HHD’s Scott Pulizzi. “If a school is not safe—if there is violence against women, if the school is so far from home that students have to walk home in the dark, or if there is no separate bathroom for girls and boys—those directly influence whether or not girls, especially, will attend school.”

Education is pivotal in preventing HIV. When children are able to attain a quality basic education, they not only have more access to learning about HIV prevention but they also have greater employment options which can build their self-esteem and their ability to assert themselves in relationships. Enrollment, retention, and completion of basic schooling are therefore important factors in increasing gender equality and reducing HIV vulnerability, especially among women.

The HHD intervention, a toolkit aptly called Building a Gender Friendly School Environment, identifies how prevailing gender roles can negatively influence health and livelihood. It provides tools that can assist teachers’ unions and educators with talking about gender issues and making changes in the school environment that improve safety and equality so students can complete their education.

The toolkit was developed as part of the EFAIDS program, an initiative of Education International in partnership with HHD and the World Health Organization. EFAIDS is a unique program that combines the efforts of teachers’ unions advocating at the national level for educating all children with their commitment to HIV/AIDS prevention in schools locally in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Pulizzi trains union leaders and teachers participating in the EFAIDS program from over 35 countries to use the toolkit materials for union policy development, publicity, and advocacy around gender issues in the school environment.

The Zambian Teachers Union, in South Africa, used these materials to advocate for and pass a gender policy to help address HIV and AIDS. According to the policy, the Union will “respond to the circumstances and needs of men and women separately, as well as together”, acknowledging the role of gender with respect to biological, socio-cultural, and economic circumstances and HIV and AIDS vulnerability. The next step for the union is to make sure the policy is implemented effectively to further promote gender equity in the schools of Zambia. The toolkit will be used as they conduct trainings around the new policy and challenge long-held patterns and beliefs.