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• HIV and AIDS Education
• Culture
• Socio-cultural approaches
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With the on-going need to improve the effectiveness of HIV and AIDS responses has come the recognition that the cultural appropriateness of these programs is crucial to their long-term success. The acknowledgement that responses must integrate both cultural and structural concerns has resulted from observations that conventional public health prevention and awareness campaigns have largely failed to reduce the transmission of HIV. Yet, ambiguity surrounding how to design and implement culturally appropriate projects has made it more difficult to develop programmes in this manner. To address this, UNESCO commissioned the Swiss Tropical Institute's (STI) Centre for International Health to identify and analyse current applications and definitions of culturally appropriate approaches in response to HIV and AIDS with a special focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Findings revealed that indeed very little concrete guidance exists and harmonisation of approaches has not been achieved. Responding to these recommendations, UNESCO has since developed a number of training manuals and toolkits to provide greater clarity concerning the development and implementation of culturally appropriate approaches.

• Start date: 26-09-2008   End date: 26-12-2013

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