Evaluating Adolescents' AIDS Education: The Experience of Uganda

One important component of health promotion, including sexual health, is the devel opment of personal skills. It is believed that a young person who has developed such skills will be better equipped to enact safe behaviours in risk situations, provided she lives in an environment that supports healthy choices in several other ways. While organisations in most countries in the world do teach young adolescents some life skills related to AIDS in schools and community programmes, indicators to evaluate such programmes are still behaviour-based. Large evaluation samples are needed to meas ure the outcome, given the small percentage who are sexually active or admit to being so. Uganda, as early as 1987, was one of the first countries along with Norway that introduced AIDS education in primary schools. An effort has been made to develop indicators to measure skills among 12- to 15-year-olds rather than behaviour. As a result of a large consultation, nine indicators were found relevant to the wide spec trum of programmes run by the government and NGOs. A protocol to assess their feasibility has been tested. The paper presents five indicators to measure the outcome and five indicators to measure the progress. It describes in detail two of these indica tors, and strongly recommends accurate testing of indicators before generalised use as well as the involvement of adolescents themselves in their development.