Youth Together Against AIDS - United States and Africa

The Pen Pal Exchange is designed to be an opportunity for youth to connect across continents. While practicing letter writing, students share their lives and learn about the lives of their peers. It is hoped that this relationship, beyond its own merit, will help students find individual and cultural similarities, appreciate their differences, and develop an interest in formerly remote situations, such as the impact of HIV/AIDS on Africa. Students are encouraged to practice a "photovoice" technique - that is, to use cameras to capture themselves and their lives so that they can better share "their story" with their pen pals. On the Youth Together Against AIDS site, a pen pal programme newsletter (in PDF format) includes a section called "Voices of Pen Pal Students", in which youth from Africa and the USA exchange poetry and other reflections on issues like discrimination against people with AIDS.

The young participants have also learned about strategies for addressing HIV/AIDS through a grantmaking programme. In this exercise, each USA group worked as a team to create a project designed to either educate their peers about HIV/AIDS in Africa or to raise funds to assist groups dealing with AIDS in Africa. Proposed education projects have included a youth-run radio show, puppet and theatre productions, and the creation of posters, pamphlets, poems and songs, all focussed on educating youth about HIV/AIDS. The young people described the goals of these activities as not only preventing and highlighting risky behaviour, but also de-stigmatising those infected with the disease and promoting conversation between youth and adults. The youth then wrote a grant proposal requesting funding (maximum of US$250) to support their project. This process was designed to encourage both critical analysis of what makes youth outreach effective as well as creative strategies to achieve their goal.

Next, each team was sent a group of proposals to evaluate. They recommended to organisers which project they thought deserved funding and why. This provided an opportunity for them to see what kinds of projects their peers had come up with, and to experience the process of deciding how to use limited funds. The groups whose projects received peer recommendations earned the full funding of $250; the groups who participated in all segments of the exercise received a seed grant of $75. These groups will this money to carry out a service project, which they will share with other groups through the programme newsletter and the Youth Together Against AIDS site. The website carries this message: "Send us your letters, photos, poems and artwork, and we will post them here to be shared with all the other youth participating. We hope to soon add a forum where youth can talk to each other."

Youth, HIV/AIDS, Stigma, Cross-cultural Exchange.

Organisers say that youth involvement in HIV/AIDS prevention - by educating their peers - is critical. According to UN statistics, half of all new infections now occur in people between the ages of 15 and 24.