The Basic Education Department has launched an initiative in response to the urgent need to address the alarming number of adolescent girls and young women contracting and dying from HIV/Aids.
The Deputy Minister of Basic Education Dr Reginah Mhaule yesterday (Thurs) launched the Education Plus Initiative in partnership with the UN and the South African National Aids Council (Sanac).
The department said the initiative is a high-profile political advocacy to accelerate actions and investments to prevent HIV infections. The Education Plus Initiative is centred on the empowerment of adolescent girls and young women and the achievement of gender equality in sub-Saharan Africa, with secondary education as the strategic entry point.
The initiative responds to the urgency of effectively addressing the alarming number of adolescent girls and young women contracting and dying from HIV/Aids.
Deputy director-general for Educational Enrichment Services, Dr Granville Whittle, said the Education Plus Initiative is a new way of co-ordinating and advocating for existing work, reaffirming the Department of Basic Education’s (DBE) conviction regarding the essence of care and support for teaching and learning.
Steve Letsike, the co-chairperson of Sanac, called on everyone to make adolescents’ well-being and development a priority.
“Make adolescents’ well-being a priority, and we can only do that if we allow young people themselves to join in this initiative. They must join forces to accelerate to champion their own issues as well. We must engage all young people and empower them, by placing them in the forefront of our response and ensure that we go beyond the health sector,” Letsike said.
UNaids country director for South Africa Eva Kiwango said the initiative responds to the urgency of effectively addressing the alarming number of adolescent and young women acquiring HIV and dying from Aids-related illnesses.
“The initiative's game-changing proposition is simple but ambitious. It calls on countries to use education systems as entry points of providing holistic packages of core elements that adolescents need to become well-rounded adults,” she said.
Kiwango said that this package includes the completion of quality secondary education, universal access to comprehensive sexuality education, fulfilment of sexual and reproductive health and rights, freedom from gender-based violence and economic empowerment.
Mhaule in her keynote address said that the rewards of this multi-sectoral initiative will be far-reaching into the longer term, with inter-generational effects.
“The work that we do together intends to respond to the needs of adolescent girls and young women to enjoy the full benefit of education as the key for unlocking the potential emancipation from structural drivers of HIV infection; early and unintended pregnancy; and gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF),” the deputy minister said.
She said that while all young people are deemed vulnerable, the prevailing gender inequality in South African society places adolescent girls and young women at greater risk of HIV and GBVF.
“The circumstantial challenges to girls impede on their school completion, which often extends to the school-to-work transition,” she said.
Mhaule added that although the work that the DBE is about to embark on with UN agencies is regarded as work of soft issues, it has the potential of altering a child’s life and therefore should not be trivialised or taken for granted.
“I hope that what emerges from this launch will strengthen and support the already existing programme within the sector and nurture those that require improvement of efficiencies. We should pay particular emphasis to evidence-based programmes that were crippled by Covid-19,” Mhaule said.
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