HIV/AIDS • In Focus

(Sheila McKinnon photo)

"Thanks to the training, I realized my life was in danger."

― Mariam, HIV/AIDS peer educator and former commercial sex worker

Prevention Education,
Peer-to-Peer

Through its food security programs, which in part oversee shipments of food to Africa, Africare has noted the special vulnerability to HIV of the people who work in the ports. Most of those people — dock workers, itinerant clearing and forwarding agents, truck drivers, vehicle salespersons, small-scale retailers (market women, tradesmen) and commercial sex workers — spend days or weeks at a time away from home. Thus mobile, they are more vulnerable to becoming infected with HIV. In the port of Cotonou, Benin, Africare supported peer-to-peer HIV-prevention education among thousands of workers. The program aimed to decrease transmission, not only among port workers, but also among the family members to whom the workers return.

Another program conducted peer-education sessions for commercial sex workers and truckers along heavily traveled routes between Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire. Several dozen peer educators were trained, and they in turn reached others. Moussa is a Burkinabe trucker. "We, the truck drivers, learned a lot from the sessions," he says. Mariam, then 21 years old, went one step further. "I first became a prostitute to escape a very rigid household," she says. "Thanks to the training, I realized my life was in danger. I decided to go back home and now work as a secretary."

 

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(Updated, Jan. 4, 2008)