Daily Graphic, Pg. 44, Thursday, April 23/09
Story Rebecca Quaicoe-Duho
THIRTY civil servants and educationist from Anglophone West Africa are in Accra to participate in a five-day workshop on mitigating the impact of HIV and AIDS in the educational sector.
The workshop is aimed at conceptualising and analysing the interaction between the epidemic and educational planning management, as well as planning and developing strategies to mitigate its impact.
Organised by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in collaboration with the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) and the Regional Office for Education in Africa, the workshop is also aimed at heightening awareness of the educational planning and management issues that the epidemic raises for the education sector and to impart planning skills.
The workshop, which is on the theme: “Educational Planning and Management in a world with AIDS”, drew participants from Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and the Gambia.
The Deputy Minister of Education (Tertiary), Dr Joseph Samuel Annan, in a message said the increase in the number of children and young people living with HIV and the need to support infected learners, teachers and educational workers in general posed new challenges to the education sector.
Quoting a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP 2005) report that described the epidemic as the “single greatest reversal in human development” in modern history, the deputy minister said the stark realities of HIV and AIDS made it “imperative for a concerted and co-ordinated response, stronger leadership and building on successes”, with an aim of achieving the Millennium Development Goal six by 2015.
He said Ghana had made significant strides in controlling the spread of the epidemic since hosting the first ECOWAS sub-regional workshop on Accelerating Education Sector Response on HIV and AIDS in 2004.
Dr Annan said the educational sector also played pivotal roles in the prevention of new infection by establishing a full-time HIV and AIDS secretariat with a mandate to co-ordinate and harmonise all HIV and AIDS activities within the sector.
He said the ongoing implementation of an HIV schools alert programme initiated in 2005 with an aim of increasing knowledge and awareness among teachers, pupils or students and the school community, was a harmonised school-based initiative aimed at reducing the spread of HIV in schools.
He said there was the need to reach out to HIV infected teachers, since they could help in educating people to reduce stigma and to influence the care and support of infected learners saying that “HIV positive teachers are thus gradually being organised by the sector to enable them to play significant roles in the mitigation of the impact of the disease on themselves and on others particularly in the education sector”.
The Director and Representative of the UNESCO Cluster Office, Accra, Ms Elizabeth Moundo, in an address said UNESCO continued to promote comprehensive, scaled-up education sector responses to AIDS and deepened education sector engagement in national responses.
Her speech, which was read on her behalf by the Programme Specialist on Science of the UNESCO Cluster Office, Accra, Mr Abou Amani, said through partnership with UN sister agencies, UNESCO had helped the education sector in Ghana to launch a publication on, ‘A study of the education sector’s response to HIV and AIDS in Ghana’, saying that the case study would help the ministry to know what was happening in the educational front in the country.
She said the study depicted the manner in which a country could plan to inform itself about how the epidemic and the response to it were carried out, showcasing numerous examples of how educational interventions had been implemented across the education sector.
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