| Abstract: | Sexual Reproductive Health (SRH) problems, including HIV, and gender
inequality remain the main challenges affecting adolescents and youth. A
survey conducted on some of the Ethiopian Higher Education Institutions
identified university students among the vulnerable groups and
considered them as the key to the future course of HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Some of the risk factors for these students include early sexual debuts
and sexual experimentation, unprotected casual sex, multiple concurrent
sexual partnership, inconsistent condom use and transactional and trans-
generational sex; while vulnerable factors include students’ university
life style, inadequate access to required services, and socio-economic
issues. Above and beyond, deficiencies in parents, schools and
community engagement with young people in open discussions about
important values of life skill building, sex and sexuality education,
HIV/AIDS, unwanted pregnancy emanate from protective behavior and
fear that they will encourage young people to engage in sexual activity.
These problems contribute to high rate of students’ dropout and
declining quality of education.
In the fight against these problems, St. Mary’s university designed and
implemented several anti-HIV/AIDS movements and gender-sensitive
programs such as peer education, life-skill education, community
conversations, outreach programs, mass events, modeling and
reinforcements, etc. The university has also made significant efforts in
terms of formulating HIV/AIDS policy, anti-sexual harassment policy
and strategy formulation and implementation focusing on preventive,
care and support and treatment services. The university accentuates that
empowering women and providing sustainable SRH education is a core action to increase their assertiveness which lead them to be at low risk of
HIV and related SRH problems. Further, to make all these efforts
sustainable, St. Mary’s university adopted an integrated approach of
mainstreaming gender and HIV/AIDS into the existing courses of the
university than teaching sexual reproductive issues; gender and
HIV/AIDS in stand-alone approach. The main purpose of this paper is,
therefore, to portray the experience of St. Mary’s university in
mainstreaming gender and HIV/AIDS issues into the university’s
curriculum. |
