Ei-iE

The Commonwealth Secretariat in cooperation with Education International has produced a report on ‘Gender, HIV/AIDS & the Status of Teachers’.

The report is a comprehensive summary of the ‘Third Commonwealth Teachers’ Research Symposium’ held in Maputo, Mozambique in February 2008. During the meeting, Dennis Sinyolo from EI presented research into ‘Teacher Supply, Recruitment and Retention in Six Anglophone Sub-Saharan African Countries’.

The impact of HIV/AIDS on Education and the Teaching Profession features prominently in the report. Helena Awurusa (Ghana National Association of Teachers), Lulama Nare (South African Democratic Teachers’ Union) and Lucy Barimbui (Kenya National Union of Teachers) present the context of Kenya, South Africa and Ghana.

The report calls for: greater involvement of workers living with HIV in all stages of HIV/AIDS programmes; provision of social services to families of teachers affected by HIV/AIDS; and for the scaling up of HIV/AIDS education and support programmes. The report highlights the EI EFAIDS Programme as an exemplary initiative, with the recommendation that it should be further “expanded to reach as many people as possible within the shortest period of time”. The Report can be downloaded from http://publications.thecommonwealth.org/.

The research by EI is available on the EI website, together with a toolkit developed by the EFAIDS Programme entitled, ‘Building a Gender Friendly School Environment’.