Gender and HIV/AIDS mainstreaming in Ethiopian private higher education institutions: A glimpse at the experience of St. Mary’s University

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.