Tools and Guidelines

The importance of commercial sex to HIV transmission has been well established in many places. Because sex workers and their clients change partners frequently, they are potentially exposed to HIV at much higher rates than others in the population. This manual provides a set of guidelines for rapidly obtaining the information necessary to begin the development of effective prevention programs for sex workers and their clients.

This package is the fourth of a series of repackaged products aimed to serve as a vehicle for alerting our users to a wealth of highly valuable educational resources that exist in the field of HIV/AIDS in the context of adolescent reproductive and sexual health. The purpose of the UNESCO Regional Clearing House’s repackaging programme is to bring to the attention of the users valuable information which would never have been read simply because they seem not to be easily accessible. Very few probably know where they are located; or if they can be accessed, they come in either highly technical or unreadable language or understandably, in the national language. Very often, they also come in overwhelming volumes and very poor presentation that discourage reading. The information consolidation and repackaging strategy of the UNESCO Regional Clearing House addresses this potential waste of resources by reviewing, analysing and selecting the most useful and relevant information, screening out poor information, processing them into more readable language culling out policy and practice implications and repackaging them into various attractive formats that would render themselves easily readable and applicable to decision-making and programme improvements.

Evaluation is too often an afterthought in the process of program implementation. This Handbook is dedicated to the premise that evaluation must be a critical part of the initial phases of planning effective HIV/AIDS prevention and care programs. Readers of this Handbook will find that the authors have set the stage and provided the tools for a comprehensive and strategic approach to evaluation. The approaches they recommend yield useful and important information on the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and support programs.

This action kit is for young people and adults who run youth programmes that are looking at issues of sexual and reproductive health, such as life skills and HIV (Human Immuno-deficiency Virus). It aims to raise awareness of the importance of gender issues in sexual and reproductive health and to provide practical ideas for introducing gender aware- ness into existing youth programmes. There are sections that explain what gender is and how it affects our relationships and our sexual and reproductive health.

This is a toolkit to guide the management and implementation of HIV prevention programmes for mobile populations in the Greater Mekong Subregion. It will be used by people and organisations who already have some experience in HIV prevention, and are now ready to address the specific challenges of working with mobile populations. Specifically, the toolkit addresses ways to work with mobile groups of construction workers, truck drivers, seafarers and migrant sex workers. While the toolkit supports HIV prevention amongst mobile population groups, it also recognises that HIV is transmitted through interaction between mobile or migrant groups and the more stable communities they pass through, live in or return to. The toolkit therefore strongly recommends that effective HIV prevention will occur only when there are programmes for mobile groups and for the more stable communities with whom they interact.

The aim of the manual is to introduce teachers and others who work with young people to a way of teaching drug education and other health issues such as HIV/AIDS, based on the development of links between knowledge values and skills.

Behavioral surveillance surveys (BSS) have been shown over several years to make an important and useful contribution to informing the national response to HIV. These surveys use reliable methods to track HIV risk behaviors over time as part of an integrated surveillance system which monitors various aspects of the epidemic. As interest and experience in BSS has grown, demand has surfaced for all the available tools to be gathered into a single document. These guidelines meet that demand. They are designed to provide a “one-stop” reference to help public health officials set up and manage systems that provide reliable trends in HIV risk behaviors. Information is also provided to help those who will be implementing the surveys themselves.

STD stands for Sexually Transmitted Disease (sometimes called Sexually Transmitted Infection). This is an infection which can be caught by having sexual contact with someone who is infected. This can be vaginal, oral or anal sex, although other types of touching can pass some STDs - for example, some STDs (such as Herpes and HPV) can be caught by touching the infected areas of someone's body and then touching your own genitals (private parts). There are quite a lot of different STDs.