School-Centred HIV and AIDS Care

SCHOOL-CENTRED HIV AND AIDS CARE
AND SUPPORT IN SOUTHERN AFRICA
T E C H N I C A L C O N S U L T A T I O N R E P O R T
2 2 – 2 4 M AY 2 0 0 7 – G A B O R O N E , B O T S WA N A

Published by:
Section on HIV and AIDS
Division for the Coordination of UN Priorities in Education
Education Sector
UNESCO
7, place de Fontenoy
75352 – Paris 07 SP, France
Web-site: http://www.unesco.org/aids
E-mail: aids@unesco.org
All rights reserved. This document may be freely reviewed, abstracted, reproduced or translated, in part or in whole, but not for sale or for use
in conjunction with commercial purposes.
Suggested citation: UNESCO. 2008. School-centred HIV and AIDS Care and Support in Southern Africa: Technical Consultation Report, 22-24 May
2008, Gaborone, Botswana. Paris, UNESCO.
© February 2008. United Nations Educational, Scientifi c and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
ED/2007/WS/43 CLD-2426.7

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments 4
Acronyms 4
Executive Summary 5
Main fi ndings 6
Principles of care and support programmes at school 7
1. Background 8
1.1 Introduction 8
1.2 The additional HIV-related demands on schools in Southern Africa 10
1.3 The constraints facing schools in Southern Africa 11
1.4 Revisiting the role of schools 12
1.5 Summary 13
2. Common elements 14
2.1 Specifi c strategies for the provision of HIV-related treatment,
care and support services 16
2.2 Towards an integrated package of services 21
3. Principles for success 24
3.1 Providing a caring school environment 24
3.2 Child-centred programming 27
3.3 Providing integrated services 27
3.4 Building on existing services 28
3.5 Involving communities 28
3.6 Issues of sustainability and scaling up 29
4. Conclusions and recommendations 32
4.1 Common elements 33
4.2 Successful principles 34
References 36
Annex: Participants list 37

4
Acknowledgments
This report was written by Tania Boler in UNESCO’s Division
for the Coordination of UN Priorities in Education, Section
on HIV and AIDS, and Emily Johnsson, Consultant.
Christoforos Mallouris, Memory Zulu and Tania Boler from
UNESCO coordinated the technical consultation. Marion
Nell acted as facilitator and Emily Johnsson acted as
rapporteur for the technical consultation.
Acronyms
AIDS Acquired Immune Defi ciency
Syndrome
ART Antiretroviral (ARV) Therapy
ARV Antireroviral
COS Circles of Support
EFA Education for All
FAO Food and Agricultural Organization
HIV Human Immunodefi ciency Virus
IEC Information, Education and
Communication
MDG Millennium Development Goal
MoE Ministry of Education
NGO Non-governmental Organization
Signifi cant contributions to this report: Christopher
Castle, Rebecca Ferguson, Michael Kelly, Ted Nierras,
Justine Sass, Havelinus Shemuketa and Ekua Yankah. The
report was edited by Vicky Anning.
OVC Orphans and other vulnerable children
PEP Post-exposure prophylaxis
SADC Southern African Development
Community
SCCS School-centred care and support
TAC Treatment Action Campaign
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientifi c
and Cultural Organization
UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund
USAID United States Agency for International
Development
WB World Bank
WFP World Food Programme
WHO World Health Organization

E X E C U T I V E
S U M M A R Y
5
There are currently more people living with HIV in
Southern Africa than in any other region in the
world. As a result of the AIDS epidemic, schools
urgently need to respond to the changing needs of their
teachers, students and local communities, not only to
protect the basic functioning of the education system,
but also as part of the wider responsibility to respond to
HIV and AIDS in the region.
While some may argue that an educational institution’s
response to HIV and AIDS should be limited to education
about HIV prevention, schools and other institutions can
– and do – play a signifi cant role in supporting all the
dimensions of a comprehensive response to HIV and
AIDS: including prevention, treatment, care and support.
Schools in Southern Africa urgently need to respond to
the HIV-related needs of their students, teachers and
communities – as part of efforts to achieve universal
access to HIV prevention programmes, treatment
and care, but also as a necessary part of achieving
international targets including Education for All (EFA)
and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)(i).
Given the urgency of the challenge, schools have already
begun to adapt and develop systems to support infected
and affected teachers and students, and to act as resources
for their communities. On a regional level, Ministers of
Education in the Southern African Development Community
(SADC) have signed a commitment to broaden the role of
schools into centres of care and support for vulnerable
children. Since the SADC issued this communiqué in 2005,
several innovative programmes have been implemented
across the region. Given the recent rise in new models
and approaches, and the need and demand to take stock
of good policies and practices in order to scale-up these
efforts, UNESCO organized a technical consultation in
Botswana in May 2007. This technical consultation built
upon the SADC communiqué and brought together the
various stakeholders (including ministries of education,
civil society, research institutions and UN and other key
stakeholders) to fi nd out what is working and what is not,
and to identify challenges that need to be overcome in
order for programmes to be scaled-up.
This report provides a synthesis of the main discussions
that took place at the technical consultation.
(i) See http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals and http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=46881&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_
SECTION=201.html

6
Although programmes varied across and within countries,
participants at the consultation agreed upon a key set of
elements of an integrated treatment, care and support
programme based in schools:
Ensuring the continuation of education: This is
the overarching objective of the education system.
In the context of high HIV prevalences, however, this
is increasingly diffi cult because HIV compounds the
challenges that communities are already facing.
Providing psychosocial support: In addition to
strategies to ensure that all children stay at school
in spite of their circumstances, it is necessary to
provide psychosocial support to children living with
or affected by HIV.
Facilitating access to treatment education: With
the increase in access to treatment, a growing
number of staff and students who are HIV-positive
are taking HIV treatment. Schools, therefore, need
to respond to a number of related issues, such as:
supporting HIV-positive students and teachers to
understand antiretroviral therapy (ART); explaining
how to access and take medication; explaining the
need to visit medical centres for frequent checkups
(and providing cover for absent teachers); and
supporting students (in particular young students)
to follow their treatment regimens.
Facilitating home-based care and education: In
many schools across Southern Africa, teachers and
students are providing outreach work to support
community members who are ill. Very broadly,
this support can be divided into two categories:
students supporting ill community members or
teachers providing home-based education to sick
students.
Responding to basic needs: In many parts of
Southern Africa, communities are dealing with the
compounded effects of HIV – poverty and hunger,
both of which are worsened by HIV and also increase
vulnerability to infection. In some contexts,
schools can become important providers of basic
needs, for example, by providing school feeding
programmes or by creating vegetable gardens.
Schools may also, in partnership with community
leaders, mobilise their communities to collect and
provide other basic needs such as school uniforms
or basic supplies such as pens.
Developing livelihood skills: Schools can play an
important role in providing livelihood programmes
to improve children’s agricultural and livelihood
skills, which will help give livelihood support and
food security to families living in poverty.
Universal precautions: It is important to have
policies and procedures in place for preventing and
safely managing accidents and injuries at schools.
It should be noted that these fi ndings do not include
specifi c programmes on HIV prevention. Although HIV
prevention is a connected and important issue relating
to treatment, care and support, a decision was made not
to dedicate signifi cant parts of the consultation to this
issue out of recognition that – for the education sector –
HIV prevention is far more advanced than the other
components of universal access.
Ma i n F i n d i n g s
In the context of high prevalences HIV compounds
the challenges that communities are already
facing

7
P r i n c i p l e s o f
C a r e a n d S u p p o r t
P r o g ramme s a t
S c h o o l
There are fi ve broad and interrelated principles that
should all be in place in order to provide a comprehensive
response to HIV and AIDS treatment, care and support
in schools:
1) Develop a caring school environment: By the
very defi nition of the terms ‘care’ and ‘support’,
an environment that delivers either or both must
be nurturing, safe and secure, inclusive and
enabling. School environments need to be free
from discrimination, stigma and violence.
2) Develop schools as centres for integrated
service delivery: Schools need to plan a holistic
package of services that complement each other
and that will involve multisectoral responses.
Schools will not necessarily be able to deliver
all of the services but can take on varying roles,
depending upon the kinds of other services
already available in a community, resources on
hand and the level of capacity and support from
within and outside the school.
3) Create programmes that are child-centred:
Children need to be at the very centre of any
school-based programme. The views of children
and young people need to be included from the
programme inception stage and it is crucial to
keep children at the centre of all stages of the
response.
4) Build on existing services: It is important that
the care and support system links in with any pre-existing
community support structures to avoid
duplication and competition between programmes
and to encourage community ownership.
5) Involve communities: One of the underlying
principles of the work that has been happening
in Southern Africa is that HIV and AIDS have
become everybody’s problem and yet nobody can
deal with the crisis alone. The rationale behind
many models of school-based care and support is
that a large number of resources already exist in
the community that can be harnessed to support
the school and vice versa.
schools and other
institutions can – and
do – play a signifi cant
role in supporting all
the dimensions of a
comprehensive response
to HIV and AIDS:
including prevention,
treatment, care and
support

8
1.1 Introduction
From very early on in the AIDS response in Southern
Africa, schools have played an important role simply
because HIV and AIDS education is a necessary part of
HIV prevention, and schools offer the infrastructure to
reach a vast number of young people before they become
infected. As the HIV epidemic has matured, so has the
response. There is now increasing understanding that
prevention, treatment, care and support programmes are
all interrelated. This understanding is embedded within
commitments to moving towards universal access to
prevention programmes, treatment, care and support.(ii)
Particularly in regions of high HIV prevalence, the
education sector is forced to take responsibility to
respond to the changing demands caused by the epidemic
for its two major constituencies: education personnel and
students. Each year, the epidemic brings new challenges:
with the increase in access to treatment, governments
in Southern Africa are grappling with how to provide
education to HIV-positive children who might be ill, and
how to protect HIV-positive teachers from stigma and
discrimination.
While each programme may take a different form that
is appropriate to the local context, there are some
basic principles that guide all of them: protecting the
very functioning of the education system and ensuring
teachers continue to teach, and that children stay in
school and continue to learn. In Southern Africa, this
requires the education sector to take an active role in
all aspects of HIV prevention programmes, treatment,
care and support. As a result, the role of schools in the
HIV response can and does go much further than simply
providing prevention education to its own communities.
1. BACKGROUND
While each
programme may
take a different form
that is appropriate
to the local context,
there are some
basic principles that
guide all of them:
protecting the very
functioning of the
education system
and ensuring
teachers continue
to teach, and that
children stay in
school and continue
to learn.
(ii) ‘Universal access’ refers to the international commitment
to provide universal access to HIV prevention programmes,
treatment, care and support by 2010. This commitment was
agreed in the UN General Assembly resolution (60/224) adopted
on 23 December 2005, and further reiterated in the Political
Declaration on HIV and AIDS adopted by the UN General
Assembly (60/224) in June 2006. Per these commitments,
countries around the world are revising their national AIDS plans
and targets so as to signifi cantly scale up their response to AIDS
towards universal access.

9
In many parts of Southern Africa – particularly in rural
areas – the number and density of schools are much higher
than hospitals or health service providers. In fact, in many
communities there are no health-care centres at all, yet it is
likely that there are schools. In consequence, the education
sector can be more robust and offer a wider reach than the
health sector. Schools can become potential centres for
the provision of HIV services to the wider community.
This might sound rather theoretical, but it is happening
already; practice has preceded policy. In many communities
that have been heavily affected by HIV and AIDS, nobody
can afford to watch events unfold passively without
some sort of personal reaction. Schools have opened
up their doors to support communities and to try and
leverage whatever support is available by connecting to
other social services. Examples include schools allowing
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and support
organizations to use their premises to provide services
such as accessing social grants, treatment education or
psychosocial support.
At the same time, there has been mounting recognition
of a potentially catastrophic orphan crisis in Southern
Africa. Schools play a central role in providing not only an
education, but also some form of psychosocial support to
compensate for the problems faced by children who have
been orphaned by AIDS. This more global discourse has
led to high-level advocacy at government level. In 2005,
UNICEF, the World Bank and the World Food Programme
(WFP) brought together the 14 Ministers of Education of
the Southern African Development Community (SADC),(iii)
and a communiqué was signed that commits governments
to make schools centres of care and support for vulnerable
children.[1]
Building upon the SADC communiqué, UNESCO organized
a technical consultation in Botswana on 22-24 May
2007. Despite much work already underway in countries
in Southern Africa, this was the fi rst attempt to bring
together the various stakeholders (ministries of education,
civil society, research institutions, UN and other key
stakeholders) to take stock of what is happening, to
analyse what is working and what is not, and to identify
challenges that need to be overcome for programmes to
be scaled-up.
The consultation brought together a wide range of
delegates with a breadth of expertise from seven countries,
including: Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, South
Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Representatives were present
from Ministries of Education, UNICEF, WFP, the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO), teachers’ unions, civil
society and research centres. (Please see the Appendix for
a full list of participants.)
The aims of the consultation were to:
Identify the needs of learners, educators and
communities in regards to HIV and AIDS care and
support, and to develop a conceptual framework for
what it means for schools to become centres of care
and support for HIV-affected communities.
. Ascertain what needs to be done in order to support
schools to act as centres of care and support for
communities, given how overstretched education
systems are in the region.
Identify what needs to be done and what strategies
need to be in place in order to scale up models of
good practice.
The scope of the consultation
included:
Southern Africa;
The role(s) of schools in the provision of HIV-related
treatment, care and support to children and
adults who are either part of the school or members
of the wider community.
Although HIV prevention is a connected and important
issue relating to treatment, care and support, a diffi cult
decision was made not to dedicate signifi cant parts of the
consultation to this issue out of recognition that – for the
education sector – HIV prevention is far more advanced
than the other components of universal access.
A number of assumptions guided the
consultation including:
In Southern Africa, every school is affected by
HIV and the situation is far from ‘business as
usual’. Schools have a responsibility to respond
to the changing needs of their most immediate
constituents: educational staff (including teachers)
and students.
The Education for All (EFA) goals in the region are
unattainable unless schools take a more active role
in responding to the impact of HIV and AIDS on the
school and local community.
Schools are part of a community, especially in
rural areas. Any HIV response within a school will
be strengthened if there is support from the local
community.
(iii) Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa,
Swaziland, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

10
The inverse relationship also applies: schools can
support communities. All sectors need to examine
the role they can play in scaling up access to HIV
prevention, treatment, care and support.
There are many programmes focusing on school-centred
support for children, in particular, for
orphans and vulnerable children (OVC). However, it
is impossible to respond to the needs of learners
without also responding to the needs of educators.
Although stand-alone, small-scale interventions are
important for establishing innovative approaches,
it is now time to think in terms of scaling up
and institutionalising support within government
policies, programmes, budgets and expenditure
frameworks.
Schools in Southern Africa are already overburdened
and under-resourced. Recommendations for scaling
up must bear this in mind and a balance needs to
be found between the ideal response and what is
possible.
This document provides a synthesis of the various
discussions that took place during the consultation. This
fi rst chapter provides an introduction and maps out how
the demands on schools have changed in the region, and
discusses some of the constraints the education sector
faces in meeting those demands. Chapter 2 maps out the
common elements between school-based programmes
concerning treatment, care and support for HIV and AIDS.
Chapter 3 provides an analysis of the main lessons learned
in terms of principles that contribute to the success or
failure of these programmes and what challenges or gaps
remain. Finally, Chapter 4 provides a brief synthesis of
the key conclusions and recommendations.
Please note that, in addition to this report, all of the
presentations made at the consultation as well as
the broader minutes of the meeting are available by
contacting aids@unesco.org.
1.2 The additional HIV-related
demands on schools in Southern
Africa
With the exception of Madagascar and Mauritius
(which are island states), all of the SADC countries are
facing generalised or hyperendemic HIV epidemics. No
community is unaffected. There is a large amount of
literature on the impact of the epidemic on schools and
communities. See for example: Ainsworth (2002), Bicego
(2002), Boler (2004) and Case (2004).[2-5] Students and
teachers have multiple needs: some of these existed
before the HIV epidemic and others are HIV-specifi c. For
example, many children in Southern Africa are growing
up in single parent households and research shows that
these children might face the same disadvantages at
school as orphans.[6-7] In addition, children with HIV
need support in taking their treatment and schools
need to be aware of the specifi c side effects that
staff or students might be experiencing as a result of
antiretroviral medication.
Identifi ed HIV-related needs for
students include:
Psychosocial needs: dealing with trauma, loss,
bereavement;
Health care: treatment needs;
Safe environments: free from violence, stigma and
discrimination;
Sex education;
Sexual and reproductive health services;
Life and livelihood skills.
Identifi ed HIV-related needs for
teachers include:
Support to access HIV services (prevention,
treatment, care and support);
Supportive human resources policies that take
account of HIV-related health needs (such as going
to hospital);
Functioning disciplinary procedures for HIV-related
stigma and discrimination;
Psychosocial support: dealing with HIV-affected
students and impact on their own lives.
Many schools are now forced to deal with multiple new
demands across the whole range of human physical,
emotional and psychological needs. Clearly, it is not
possible for teachers (and the education sector more
broadly) to take responsibility for all of these problems.
Chapter 3 deals more specifi cally with the different roles
the education sector can play. However, in brief, schools
can take responsibility for some services and, in other
cases, act as a facilitator for referrals to health and
social services.

11
It is obvious that these HIV-related needs place huge
additional demands on education systems that are
already struggling to deliver quality education for all.[8] A
clear understanding of the constraints on the education
sector is important as far as what can realistically be
scaled up in terms of HIV treatment, care and support.
This is not to suggest that schools cannot and should
not respond to HIV and AIDS beyond HIV prevention
education, but rather to inject a sense of the scale of
the challenge.
1.3 The constraints facing schools in
Southern Africa
The following section is an edited excerpt from a
paper delivered by Peter Badcock-Walters, Director
of EduSector AIDS Response Trust, during the
consultation:(iv)
Are schools too overburdened and the education system
too weak to take on these additional responsibilities? In
order to answer this question it is important to assess
the systemic environment within which schools operate
and what constraints these place on action.
In a general sense, the systemic environment is less
than optimal, but this is not only because of the impact
of HIV and AIDS. The epidemic has simply added to
existing problems and made these worse over nearly
three decades.
In terms of the policy environment, every country in the
region publicly subscribes to almost every regional and
international convention and agreement on the rights
of the child: Education for All, Millennium Development
Goals, human rights in the workplace and the like. Many
countries also have excellent and often comprehensive
education sector policies, which address prevention,
treatment, care, support, workplace issues and the
management of the response. Several have national
implementation plans complete with goals, objectives
and action plans, but only a few have begun to develop
equivalent decentralised implementation plans.
The record of delivery against these policies is less
heartening. For a variety of reasons, there has been a
general failure to make things happen. Lack of fi nancial
resources is often identifi ed as the reason for this problem,
coupled with lack of capacity, but it is time to stop this
argument in its tracks. Money for the HIV and AIDS
response, including for OVC, is rolled over year after year
or trapped in bilateral pipelines across the region.
The considerable capacity that has been built has all too
often left the system and migrated to donor agencies,
consultancies, the NGO sector or other countries. It is
now time for education ministries and their development
partners to turn their attention to the retention of skills
within sustainable systems that work. Until this happens
– and it can be done – education systems will remain
somewhat dysfunctional and capacity will remain to an
extent outside the system.
It is also true to say that the system is overburdened
with competing priorities and does not necessarily see
HIV-related care and support as its role. Government
offi cials, school principals and teachers perennially
battle for the human and material resources simply to
provide basic education in less than perfect conditions.
Add an additional burden in the form of response to a
stigmatised disease – an added and perhaps confusing
responsibility in terms of prevention, care and support
– and it is likely that there may be some reluctance to
fully engage with the issues.
This reality check is uncomfortable and does not do
justice to those many educators and offi cials who commit
themselves wholeheartedly to responding as best as they
can. The point is that response at the school level is
often hampered by this lack of sectoral structure and
guidance, including training, to provide school principals
with the skills and knowledge they require to lead a local
response, and it is therefore critical to fi nd ways to deal
with this shortcoming.
This is less a criticism of the education system than an
understanding that the system already has its hands full
trying to meet its traditional mandate as best it can. It
also implies that, in designing school-based responses,
it is crucial to recognise these system constraints and
work to fi nd a way around them.
In short, we cannot assume that every school is able and
willing to take its place in responding to HIV and AIDS.
But every school can be mobilised to do so. This requires a
sympathetic understanding of the prevailing constraints,
and the ability to demonstrate the positive dividends
that can be expected for school and community alike,
if a sustained, comprehensive local strategy is adopted,
along national policy and planning guidelines.
(iv) For an unabridged version, please email aids@unesco.org

12
1.4 Revisiting the role of schools
Given the numerous constraints described above, is it
realistic to expect schools in Southern Africa to play
a major role in the delivery of HIV treatment, care and
support programmes? Also, is scaling up only dependent on
more funding? After decades of learning from development
programmes in education, it is widely recognised that
– although investing large sums of money in one school
can result in that school becoming a perfect model of
educational best practice – many of these programmes
are simply too complicated or too costly to scale up on a
national level.[9-12]
Some compromise needs to be made between the maximum
potential given optimal conditions and what is possible
given the actual prevailing conditions. This issue was
discussed throughout the three-day technical consultation,
especially when discussing implications across the sub-region.
The strength of the education system differs widely
between many of the countries and, in addition, the level of
available support services for schools to tap into is uneven
in its coverage – both within and across countries.
A discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of
increasing the role of schools in the provision of HIV
treatment, care and support services is summarised in Table
1 below.
Despite the severe limitations facing the education sector
across Southern Africa, participants at the consultation were
unwavering about the urgent necessity for the education
sector to take an active stance in the provision of HIV
treatment, care and support services. There was general
agreement that failure to do so will ultimately undermine
efforts to achieve the EFA goals in the sub-region as well as
contributing to a worsening of the AIDS epidemic.
The question, therefore, is not whether this is possible, but
how is it possible? Consensus seems to be emerging that
schools will be stretched far past their capacity if expected
to provide all HIV services themselves. However, what is far
more realistic is for schools to tap into existing resources
and to act as a link between service providers (or expertise
in the community) and people who need those services.
Table 1. Advantages and disadvantages of increasing the role of schools in the provision
of HIV treatment, care and support services
Advantages
+
Disadvantages
-
Schools are highly accessible and
provide long-term opportunities
Many schools in the region are poorly resourced
and overburdened
Schools have existing infrastructure to reach large
numbers of people
Many teachers are not qualifi ed, willing or have the
confi dence to take on a counselling and guidance role
Schools are sustainable service providers because they
have strong state commitment and are one of the fi rst
services to be resumed in emergency situations
Many of the most vulnerable community members
are not in school
Without responding to the complex needs of teachers and
learners, the education system will be unable
to achieve the EFA goals
There are other government departments that are better
equipped to deal with issues of social protection

13
1.5 Summary
This chapter has very briefl y highlighted the urgent
reasons why schools in Southern Africa have no choice
but to respond to the impact that HIV and AIDS are
having on their educational staff, learners and local
communities. The challenges and needs are daunting
and multifaceted. However, failure to respond is already
undermining the achievement of EFA in the sub-region.
Schools can and already do offer an unparalleled resource
in many communities, but far more needs to be done.
At the same time, it is important to factor in how
overburdened education systems are in the region. This
is not an excuse for inaction, or as Father Michael Kelly
(participant from Zambia) stated:
‘We see the salience of
the school as a multipurpose community
development and welfare centre from
which community action on behalf
of prevention, care, support and
impact mitigation would be energised,
coordinated and driven. These are great
challenges and avoiding them is a recipe
for a bleak future. Confronting them
promises hope.’
This chapter also provided a snapshot of the changing
needs in highly affected areas. Many of these needs
already existed and are simply magnifi ed by the HIV
and AIDS epidemic. The next chapter will look at how
schools in Southern Africa are responding to these
various needs.
‘Schools provide a unique opportunity
for HIV and AIDS intervention in the
lives of their staff, learners and wider
communities. There are few viable
alternatives that offer access to so many
young people and their mentors over such
a sustained period.’
Male participant at the consultation

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2. COMMON
ELEMENTS
One of the main objectives of the technical consultation was to map out the various activities in school-based
HIV treatment, care and support that are occurring throughout Southern Africa and then to pull out the
success factors and common challenges (see Chapter 3).
A preliminary mapping exercise resulted in the summary table on the following page. What is immediately apparent is
the range of different activities that schools are undertaking. Some programmes are offering only one type of support
service, while other programmes attempt to offer an integrated and comprehensive set of services. The different
types of services that schools can support can be depicted in Figure 1 (see above).
As mentioned earlier, it is unlikely that schools will be in a position to offer all the services outlined in Figure 1.
Instead, what is more likely is that headteachers and school committees will have to make strategic choices
from a ‘menu’ of services that are most suitable and feasible given available resources for their schools and their
communities.
The remainder of this chapter provides a short summary of each of the activities listed in the diagram with some
practical case studies.
14
Figure 1. Conceptual
framework for the role
of school as part of the
response to HIV and AIDS

Table 2. Mapping of school-based HIV and AIDS care programmes in Southern Africa
represented at the technical consultation
15
Target
Group
Name of
project
Age group Objectives Main activities Observed outcomes
and impact
Children MiET
South Africa
• Not specifi ed • Improved access to quality
education
• Improved school retention
• Improved learner performance
• Strengthening schools
• Providing a support
system for schools
• Ensuring service provision
around school
• Improved access to
services and resources
• Shifting attitudes among
teachers
• Increased community
participation in schools
UN World Food
Programme
• Primary
school age
• Promote adaptive and
positive behaviours that will
reduce risk of HIV infection
• School feeding
• Life skills education
• Dissemination of
messages about HIV and
AIDS to learners and
parents
Orphans and
Vulnerable
Children
(OVC)
Save the
Children (US)
Uganda
Malawi
Mozambique
• 3-6 years
• 6-12 years
• Improve access to quality
education
• Use schools as entry point for
services
• Improve psychosocial and
cognitive development
• Key child health and
nutrition interventions
• Tracking and follow-up
of children at risk out of
dropping out of school
• Strengthened social
interactions and
improved psychosocial
status of children
• Improved primary school
readiness
Ministry of
Education,
Lesotho
• 3-18 years • Provision of bursaries
• Provision of meals in primary
schools
• Payment of school,
examination and boarding
fees
• Engagement and payment
of caterers
• 130,000 have accessed
education, mainly at
secondary level
• One decent meal per day
CINDI
(Children
in Distress)
Zambia
• 5-20 years • Facilitate payment of user
and exams fees in grades 8-12
• Procurement and distribution
of education materials
• Partnership management
• Payment of user and
examination fees
• Provision of educational
materials
• Networking with schools
through teachers
• Increased numbers of
OVC accessing education
• Retention of boys and
girls in schools
• Increased advocacy
for OVC welfare in 53
schools
Teachers CINDI-Kitwe
Zambia
• 17-25, grade
12 leavers
• Provide access to teacher
training courses and peer
education training
• Develop and maintain a
contact database
• Teacher training
• Training and selection
of 190 peer educators to
work in 60 CINDI schools
• Database development
• 43 teacher graduates
since 2003
• 1,952 girls and 1,674
boys reached through
peer education
• 42% of students in anti-
AIDS club membership
• Good record keeping
Save the
Children (US)
Uganda
Malawi
Mozambique
• Teachers • Improve access to quality
education
• Use schools as entry point for
services
• Improve psychosocial and
cognitive development
• Identifi cation, training
support
• Safe school policies
• Psychosocial training for
teachers
• Life-skills HIV
prevention training
• Peer training on VCT and
treatment
• Improved ability of
school management
committees and teachers
to identify children at
risk
• Improved knowledge and
skills
• Increased awareness
about VCT
Ministry of
Education,
Lesotho
• Primary and
secondary
school
teachers
• Provision of psychosocial
support to OVC
• Training of teachers as lay
counsellors
• Counselling of teachers
and students at school
• Positive change of
attitude among teachers
UN World Food
Programme
• Teachers • Increase awareness and
compassion towards people
living with HIV
• Life skills workshops • Formation of AIDS clubs
• Trained teachers act as
focal points
Community
members
UN World Food
Programme
• Parents • Increase awareness about
HIV and AIDS and increase
compassion towards people
living with HI
• Life skills and
sensitisation workshops
• ‘Culture of silence’
among parents has been
broken
Save the
Children (US)
Uganda
Malawi
Mozambique
• Not specifi ed • Mobilise communities • Community mobilisation • Strong community
ownership
• Improved community
action in response to
threats, e.g. abuse
• Increased free time for
child carers

16
2.1 Specifi c strategies for the
provision of HIV-related
treatment, care and support
services
Ensuring the continuation of
education
Ensuring the continuation of education for children
is the overarching objective of the education system.
In the context of high HIV prevalence, this is
increasingly diffi cult. HIV compounds the problems
communities are already experiencing, such as poverty
and unemployment.[13-14] The idea of HIV exacerbating
existing problems rather than creating a whole new
set of problems was a recurring theme throughout the
consultation. This has clear programmatic implications.
It suggests shifting the focus away from HIV programmes
towards more general and inclusive programmes that
support children who may be facing a multitude of
challenges, including staying in school and obtaining a
quality education.
It is clear from this perspective that responses are
urgently needed to get children back to school – from
those who have dropped out of school to those who
never enrolled or those who are at risk of dropping out.
In terms of what kind of response is needed, much has
been learnt in the area of inclusive education and child-friendly
schools.
Typical procedures include:
Monitoring children’s attendance and some
rudimentary indicators of vulnerability;
Conducting home visits to encourage children
who are not enrolled to enrol in school;
Waiving school fees or providing support for
supplies such as uniforms, pens or books;
Making lessons more fl exible to suit the needs
of students who might be working or have HIV-related
care duties in the household;
Providing school feeding programmes.
Sometimes, a child’s motivation to stay in school is
infl uenced by far less tangible and measurable events,
as the following quote shows:
‘… activities that can have a real impact
such as teachers walking with a child to
school every morning to ensure they go
to school and get there safely. Instead of
beating the child because they are late,
teachers ask the child “why are you late”?
These changes in attitudes and values are
important and have a real impact but it is
just anecdotal evidence and it is diffi cult
to capture data on this sort of thing.’
Female participant, South Africa
The concept of inclusive education is central to any
school that provides care and support. Some of the
main principles that underline inclusive education are
provided in the next chapter.
Box 1. Identifying vulnerable children without stigmatising
To date, there is no consistent framework in the region for assessing the needs of children, and in particular, children
in need. It was reported that children are often assessed based on their physical appearance and their behaviour,
and by conducting home visits to interview caregivers. However, there is no standardised list of criteria for assessing
what kinds of appearance or behaviour to expect from needy children. It is crucial, if systems are to be effective, well
run and comparable across Southern Africa, that data of this kind are collected in as consistent a way as possible by
trained data collectors.
This is also crucial for monitoring purposes – as the status of a vulnerable child changes over time, and the progres-sion
of a child must be captured to ensure they receive the right care and support.
It is clear that any school-based care and support system must include the whole school and all children to ensure
that those infected or affected by HIV are not stigmatised. Having said this, it was also highlighted that the needs of
both those infected and affected must have a high priority within the care and support system, as these learners will
be both physically and emotionally challenged. Further, it should be pointed out that all children living in communi-ties
with a high prevalence of HIV and AIDS will be affected by the epidemic in one form or another, even if their own
family is not affected directly.

17
The question is: to what extent should teachers take
on this counselling role themselves? Some of the
participants argued that teachers can be trained and
supported to take on a rudimentary counselling role,
especially in resource-poor countries where a system of
accessible social workers simply does not exist. However,
teachers are already overburdened and to expect them
to develop a second skill-set and to take on additional
responsibilities may be unrealistic. Nonetheless, teachers
can and do take an active role in care and support
programmes, often going far beyond the call of duty.
Another possibility discussed was the use of
paraprofessionals and the potentially important role
they could play in either providing or referring children
for psychosocial services. Paraprofessionals can be
trained adults in the community who complement the
role of teachers. In many cases they are volunteers, but
in other cases they might be paid. In terms of sustaining
motivation, it is advantageous if their skills can also be
developed so that there is a proper career development
path for paraprofessionals as well as professionals.
Providing psychosocial support for
children
In addition to strategies to ensure that all children stay
at school, it may also be necessary to provide specialised
psychosocial support to HIV-affected children. As
mentioned earlier, the spectrum between resilience and
vulnerability is dynamic and is affected by a wide range
of circumstances. In the face of prolonged parental
illness and death (of one or both parents), some children
will benefi t from counselling to deal with the trauma. In
some countries, such guidance and counselling services
already exist in schools and the challenge therefore
becomes how to sensitise the counsellors to the impact
of HIV and AIDS on a child. In other circumstances,
counsellors might not be available in schools but are
part of the wider social services system. In this case, it
is possible for teachers to refer vulnerable children to
these existing services.
‘My main problems are food and not
getting enough time to study. My other
problem is when I see a need to bunk class
to look for food, the next day I fi nd that I
am in trouble for bunking.’
Participant in the Circles of Support project,
Botswana
‘One of our problems is that we are
working with this notion of vulnerable
children as if the status is static: children
constantly move along the continuum
from well-being and resilience to
vulnerability over a period of time and
this is dependent upon their positive or
negative experiences.’

18
Treatment education at school
With the increase in access to treatment, a growing
number of teachers and students who are HIV-positive
will need support in their workplace (for teachers and
non-teaching staff)[15] and in the learning environment
(for students) to continue taking and adhering to their
treatment regimes. Schools therefore need to respond to
a number of related issues:
Supporting HIV-positive students to take treatment;
Supporting teachers and students to visit medical
centres for periodic checkups (and providing cover
for absent teachers);
Understanding the effects of treatment and how
these might impact on a teacher’s ability to teach
or a student’s ability to learn;
Adapting HIV and AIDS curricula to include
information on treatment so that students are not
taught out-of-date information;
Teaching students about treatment and the harm
caused by stigma and discrimination so that they
are better able to support their parents and families
in accessing and adhering to treatment.
In South Africa, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC)
views treatment literacy in schools as a key area of
work. Schools serve as an entry point to engage young
people at risk of HIV infection and young people living
with HIV. The programme is multifaceted and works with
teachers, peer educators and HIV-positive students.
Learners living with HIV are encouraged to form AIDS
Action Committees (AACs), which in turn campaign
within schools for supportive policies, HIV prevention
and treatment education, availability of condoms and
formation of support groups for learners living with
HIV.
In addition, TAC trains teachers in schools to provide
treatment education to young people. This training
includes information on different treatment regimens;
how to adhere to treatment; and the importance of
continued protective behaviours and healthy living.
Teachers are also encouraged to test for HIV infection
and trained how to live positively with the virus. In
addition to teachers, several peer youth educators are
trained in each school. These peer educators pass on
treatment literacy information within schools but also
play an advocacy role within schools by campaigning
for the rights of HIV-affected children with teachers and
through student representative bodies.
TAC sees the school as one of the most important vehicles
for responding to HIV, as it reaches a large proportion of the
community. However, it is only one of many vehicles and the
programme also targets churches and community leaders.
Home-based care and education
In many schools across Southern Africa, teachers and
students are providing outreach work to support sick
community members. Very broadly, this support can be
categorised as follows:
Students supporting sick community members;
Teachers providing home-based education to sick
students.
In some school-based programmes, students are encouraged
to provide home-based care to adult community members.
The rationale behind these programmes is that, not only
will this benefi t the individual in need of care, but it will
also act to reinforce any lessons about HIV and AIDS
through experiential learning and reduce stigma through
personal contact (see Box 2 below). Similarly, in some
schools, students are encouraged to take a caring role
towards students who are in ill health – something similar
to a mentoring scheme.
In the Circles of Support project in Botswana, some
schools have initiated a programme in which teachers
visit the homes of sick children and provide educational
provision in homes. Although this tackles the problem
of how to keep educating children when they are too
sick to attend school, it creates another diffi culty: who
will replace the teacher in the classroom whilst that
teacher is out visiting households? In order not to
disrupt classroom teaching, some teachers are visiting
households after school hours. However, this creates an
additional burden on teachers with the expectation that
they are going to work longer hours without additional
remuneration. Some participants also noted that teachers
often live far away from the school community, so this
approach is not always feasible.
‘For all of these programmes, it makes
a huge difference depending on where
the teacher lives. In one of our schools
more than half the teachers commuted
over 90km to go back to the city each day.
These “commuter teachers” have no time
to go and visit children in homes.’

19
Box 2. Involving young people
in the care and support of AIDS-affected
children in KwaZulu-Natal,
South Africa (Horizons programme:
Population Council, South Africa)
Involving young people in the care and support of
people living with HIV helps those who are both in-fected
and affected. The involvement of young people
in caregiving also helps to reduce AIDS-related stigma
in the community and increases risk perception and
the adoption of HIV preventive behaviours among
young caregivers.
The Population Council in South Africa is collaborat-ing
with Valley Trust to evaluate a school-based model
that trains students to provide care and support to
children affected by AIDS. The study also examines
the feasibility and acceptability of implementing
youth-to-youth services and outreach activities for
the care and support of vulnerable children within a
school setting.
The intervention focuses on developing and imple-menting
youth-to-youth services that involve young
infected people, young people who are at risk of in-fection,
and young people who are household heads
or caring for sick adults. Intervention activities in-clude
training in care and support for caregivers and
after-school support for young people that includes
homework assistance, HIV and AIDS education and
psychosocial support, as well as club-based peer ac-tivities.
Universal precautions
Normal teaching and learning activities do not place
anyone at risk of HIV infection. However, accidents
and injuries at school can produce situations where
students or staff might be exposed to another person’s
body fl uids. Because very often people do not know they
are infected with HIV, it is important to have in place
policies and procedures for safely managing accidents
and injuries at schools in all circumstances (known as
universal precautions).[16] Universal precautions are not
only important for prevention of HIV infection but they
are also signifi cant for any blood-borne infection. To
reduce fear and discrimination, schools need to inform
all staff and students about the infection-control policy
and address concerns through open discussion.
Precautions typically include policies on caring for
wounds, cleaning up blood spills and safely disposing
of medical supplies. It is also advisable to have certain
emergency supplies on hand, such as latex gloves and
medicines including post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP),
which are antiretroviral medications that can be taken
as soon as possible after potential exposure to HIV in
order to reduce the likelihood of becoming infected.
Posters about universal precautions should give
clear instructions on what to do if there is body fl uid
contact and information on where to go for appropriate
medications
Support for basic needs
‘It has been shown from what children say
that they remain vulnerable in their homes.
They are discriminated against, they are
not listened to, they are made to work hard
and sometimes do not get enough time to
study. All of these challenges would not go
away no matter how much material support
the children get…’
In many parts of Southern Africa, communities are
dealing with the compounded effects of HIV, poverty
and hunger. The question therefore arises: what role do
schools have in meeting these basic physical needs?
Participants at the consultation were very divided over
this issue. On the one hand, it was acknowledged that
meeting the basic needs of highly vulnerable children
is often the fi rst automatic response by teachers and
communities, because it offers an immediate and
tangible impact. There are some very simple things that
teachers and schools can do to address the basic needs
of learners: ensuring, for example, that children are fed
at school and that needy children are supported with
food baskets.
Schools in the region are tending to respond primarily
only to basic needs. One of the main reasons is that
many schools are already under-resourced and providing
material support is often just a short-term solution that

20
is diffi cult to sustain or scale up. There was also concern
that focusing on material needs is happening because
it is easier than dealing with psychosocial needs. The
argument continues that, in terms of the impact of
HIV and AIDS on children, schools need to prioritise
psychosocial support, as they are custodians of children
for most of the week.
Any programme must fi nd ways to address the particular
needs of its target community. An ideal programmatic
response in one region may be inappropriate in others.
For example, school vegetable gardens may be more
appropriate where school sizes are relatively small, and
there is sustainable access to water and land.
Teaching livelihood skills
When parents fall sick and die as a result of AIDS, their
children can be marginalised. As a result of this, vital
agricultural knowledge and life skills are not passed down,
leaving children vulnerable to hunger, malnutrition and
illness. In response to this crisis, Junior Farmer Field
and Life Schools (JFFLS) were developed to improve
children’s agricultural and life skills, which in turn impact
on livelihood support and food security. Piloted in
Mozambique in 2003, the programme has now expanded
to Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Swaziland, Tanzania, and
Zambia. The programme sets up a farming school for 12 to
17 vulnerable young people, both in-school and out-of-school.
Teachers act as facilitators and local community
members also play a supporting role.
‘Formal schools are a key institutional
entry point for JFFLS and have a
strong comparative advantage given
the existing institutional frameworks
and structures: practicality, outreach,
human capacity, involvement of school
directors, etc. Partnerships with schools
offer opportunities to take advantage of
existing capacity and to institutionalise
new capacity.’
Female participant, Zimbabwe
At each JFFLS site, trained teachers use a participatory
approach to pass on agricultural knowledge and life
skills to vulnerable young people. The one-year learning
programme follows the crop cycle. Links are established
between agriculture, nutrition, gender equality and life-skills
knowledge so that young participants learn to grow
healthy crops and to make informed decisions about leading
healthy lives.
Participatory fi eld activities include crop selection and
cultivation, land preparation, pest management, cultivation
of medicinal plants and income generation; local theatre,
art, dance and song are also integral aspects of each JFFLS
day. The programme seeks to include equal numbers of boys
and girls in all schools and stresses gender equality as well
as child rights and protection.
Social grants
The importance of social grants/protection mechanisms and
the need for every government to ensure that these become
available was clear following the technical consultation.
For example, in South Africa, the edutainment (education
plus entertainment) organization ‘Soul City’ has played a
key role in supporting the roll out of the government’s child
support grant. In addition to media campaigns, Soul City has
used schools as a community base to help families to obtain
the required documentation and to register for the grant.
The work Soul City has been doing is particularly important
in demonstrating how different government departments
can work together (in this case, the Department of Social
Development and Department of Education).

21
Box 3. Monitoring programmes in
care and support
The measuring and monitoring of processes needs
to be considered right from the beginning of a pro-gramme
or planning stage. Monitoring must be em-bedded
in the whole planning process – during con-sultation,
during the establishment of structures for
a programme and during the building of partner-ships.
Relevant indicators for school-based care and support
include:
• Percentage of children accessing some form of
support or resources such as grants, food or psy-chosocial
support;
• Percentage of parents or caregivers involved in
their children’s care and support;
• Percentage of education personnel accessing sup-port;
• Percentage of children in households below pov-erty
line;
• Percentage of households headed by children,
percentage of OVC formerly institutionalised or
homeless who are now reunited with a caregiver
in their community;
• Number of and percentage of children of school-going
age currently accessing primary education;
• Number of and percentage of orphaned girls com-pleting
primary education;
• Occurrence of training for out-of-school young
people that integrates AIDS into the curriculum.
Although the importance of listening to children and
young people is vital in a school-based care and sup-port
system, there is currently no coherent framework
for capturing and reporting on qualitative aspects of
care and support, such as the impact of psychosocial
support, or the use of participatory teaching meth-ods.
Since this is the case, the majority of gathered
qualitative data tends to be anecdotal.
Even where methods for capturing qualitative data
(for example, a diary) have been introduced, no wide-ly
recognised framework for analysis and reporting
upon this data has been established. It was suggested
that governments and NGOs should work more closely
with academic research departments to establish
long-term partnerships for skills sharing and sup-port
with methods for data collection and analysis.
Further, it was suggested that, since a care and sup-port
system should be linked in with the whole edu-cational
culture of a school, and not seen as an add-on
service for some children, indicators must be linked
in with those used by school inspectors.
2.2 Towards an integrated package
of services
In addition to the list of separate activities described
above, some organizations have taken a different
approach and developed an integrated model for schools
as centres of care and support. The two main models are
Circles of Support (Botswana, Namibia, and Swaziland)
and Schools as Centres of Care and Support (South Africa,
Swaziland and Zambia).
In both of these programmes, children are the main
benefi ciaries of the programme. A range of complementary
services ensure that children continue at school by
providing a caring and supportive environment.
Boxes 4 and 5 describe each model in detail. Similarities
between the two models include:
They are both grounded in children’s rights and
the principles of EFA;
They both draw on the strengths and skills already
present in communities to support children;
They both train teachers to understand the
additional problems faced by children affected by
HIV;
They both use the school as a resource centre for
communities through provision of adult education
(SCCS) or livelihood skills (CoS). However,
CoS seems to be silent on the development of
livelihood skills, and the SCCS box seems likewise
to be silent on adult education.
Part of the rationale for a more integrated approach is
that – while HIV treatment, care and support clearly
have special considerations that need to be addressed
– schools and communities also grapple with an array
of social problems related to HIV on a daily basis. Such
problems may include drug and alcohol misuse, sexual
abuse and violence against women and children, as well
as abandonment by caregivers and income providers.
Therefore, it is important to look at a care and support
system holistically. Focusing on HIV treatment, care
and support in isolation is unhelpful as it ignores other
aspects of a person’s or community’s life.

Box 4. Case study – Circles of Support (CoS)
Between 2003 and 2005, a programme called ‘Circles of Support’ was piloted in 36 schools across Botswana, Namibia
and Swaziland. Children are at the centre of this model. The collaboration of local communities is also fundamental
to the approach of Circles of Support so that schools can deliver the range of activities that are needed to support a
vulnerable child.
The fi rst ‘circle of support’ around a child is a network of individuals in the child’s immediate environment – family,
friends and neighbours. The second circle of support is the school and its staff, other members of the local community
and local professionals such as a nurse or counsellor; the third circle of support consists of the provincial and national
social sector policy framework.
The overall purpose of the programme is to ensure that the basic needs of children are met, to provide psychosocial
support for children affected by HIV and AIDS, to ensure that children remain in school and that those dropping out
of school can return to their studies.
Every pilot school implemented the approach in different ways. Some decided to try out the suggested programmatic
components; others decided to stick to government guidelines for care and support. However, essentially the model
suggests the school as the meeting point for a number of ‘protagonists’: school convenors; neighbourhood agents
(selected through community structures); and fi eldworkers (initially playing an advocacy role, then part of monitor-ing
22
and evaluation).
The way the programme was set up needed to be fl exible enough to respond to the nature of the community – espe-cially
in regards to training needs. School convenors and neighbourhood agents were encouraged to attend training
together so that they built a team (in some cases the heads of school took part as well).
The CoS programme did not provide money/grants for economic development in pilot communities. Instead, the pro-gramme
wanted to investigate to what extent opportunities for local resources could be identifi ed and harnessed for
developing and sustaining the programme. It was found that taking responsibility for the funding and management
of the programme can enhance ownership and motivation in communities

Box 5. Case study – School-centred care and support in KwaZulu-Natal,
South Africa (Media in Education Trust – MiET)
In the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, which has a particularly high prevalence of HIV, the district governors
have used the Schools as Centres of Care and Support (SCCS) model developed by the Media in Education Trust (MiET)
as a guiding principle when implementing school-based care and support programmes.
The KwaZulu-Natal education policy has embedded the concept of inclusive education in their education policy by look-ing
23
holistically at the various barriers to learning.
In implementing a care and support system to address these barriers to learning, a cross-sector leadership team
(involving education, health care, social welfare, transport, agriculture, etc.) has been created drawing on managers
from the municipal and district level, as well as local governors and ministries.
Further, within each school circuit, each sector has provided representative(s) to form the ‘Integrated Services
Delivery Team’ (IST). This team consists of a range of service providers such as health-care workers, a learning sup-port
worker (who provides support with curriculum adaptation in order to tailor programmes to local needs), a com-munity
development worker and a councillor. The team works with a group of four to fi ve clusters of schools in an
area.
Each cluster is made up of wards, which each has a support team to coordinate services. Each school in turn has got a
formal, institution-based support team consisting of teachers, learners and community members. Such leadership at
school level is crucial to integrated service delivery. Care and support is not seen as an add-on, but part of the main-stream
provision. In fact, it is integrated into the curriculum at all levels, and built into planning.
This is an example of a truly multisectoral partnership where advocacy is key. The strengths of the programme are
multifaceted. For example:
1) Political leadership – the education policy of the district has agreed to an inclusive education policy;
2) Committed participation at all levels;
3) Tangible results;
4) Multisectoral teams;
5) Strong focus on community – ISTs made up of teachers, learners, community members – each with their own port-folio
of expertise and experience (will link with community members, e.g. respected leaders);
6) Champions (although it is diffi cult to fi nd and keep them).
However, despite this strong methodology, getting people from different departments to join budgets and plan to-gether
has been challenging at times – especially scaling up multisectoral collaboration at all levels. Partnerships
are often all too fragile if there are no mechanisms in place at policy level to strengthen them. Another challenge has
been that, in order to ensure high-quality management and delivery, it has been necessary to build in a strong focus
on capacity development at all levels – especially in leadership skills.

3. PRINCIPLES
FOR SUCCESS
24
This chapter outlines some of the successful principles
that underline school-based HIV and AIDS treatment,
care and support. There are fi ve overall general principles
that need to be included:
create a caring school and learning environment;
provide child-centred programming;
provide integrated services;
build on existing services; and
involve communities.
Each of these principles is highlighted in Table 3 and
discussed in more detail below.
These principles are highly related to one another – a
child-centred approach is necessary in order to develop
a caring and supportive environment and will lead to
integrated services, which in turn will need to rely
on building upon existing services and community
involvement.
3.1 Providing a caring school
environment
Schools do not exist in a vacuum, but play an integral
role in any community. Schools provide venues for the
exchange of ideas and learning. Schools have an existing
infrastructure to reach a large number of people and can
be sustainable service providers because they have a
strong state commitment and are one of the fi rst services
to be resumed in emergency situations.
Therefore it makes good sense to consider schools as
the entry point or gateway for a community’s care and
support system, not only for students and teachers
and other school staff, but also for other members of a
community, in particular all children and young people
irrespective of age and education status (e.g. those never
enrolled and those who have dropped out of school).
However, the implementation of a care and support
system within an institution will have a clear effect on
how the overall provision to participants is delivered,
and the very ethos on which the provision is founded.

25
Table 3. Principles for success
Principles Policy implications Implications for implementation
Caring school
environment
• Work-based policy centred on the rights of children,
with particular emphasis on gender equality and
protection
• Zero tolerance towards violence and other rights
violations
• Explicit policy to combat stigma and discrimination.
• Policy to be developed in consultation with children
and young people and community members as well as
school staff
• Curriculum that is fl exible and ensures education for
the whole development of the child
• Recreation opportunities for staff and learners
• Training of teachers, school staff and community support
workers in policy, child protection and child rights,
participatory teaching methods, life skills education, EQ
education, psychosocial support skills, communication skills,
needs assessments and monitoring and evaluation
• System of peer support and other psychosocial support for
teachers
• Union support for teachers
• Psychosocial support, learning support and room for play for
learners
• Forums for dialogue
Child-centred
programmes
• Policies that refl ect a rights-based approach
• Involvement of children and young people in the
design and implementation of programmes
• Support that is material but also deals with emotional
problems faced by children
• Spaces for children’s voices to be heard
• Creation of or linking to existing networks of support for
children
• Training teachers how to identify and care for vulnerable
children
• Creation of monitoring systems for vulnerable children
Integrated
services
• Policy-making across government departments, district
municipality and local community levels
• Funding to be drawn from across different
departments
• Care and support system to include all children and
young people irrespective of age and school status,
parents and guardians, disadvantaged, illiterate,
disabled and other vulnerable populations
• Services to respond to mapped local needs
• Youth-friendly services policy
• Strong assessment, monitoring and evaluation policy
• Close collaboration of health-care professionals and social
workers with schools, including frequent and routine visits
• Referral of learners, school staff and members of community
to services outside school
• School hosting of services delivered by other departments
and organizations
• Opportunities for networking
• Assessment and harnessing of local needs and resources
• Opportunities for continued professional development for
professionals and paraprofessionals to learn skills across
sectors
• Curriculum to include treatment literacy • Assessment and monitoring of service receivers
• Training of teachers, school staff and community volunteers
and staff members in HIV and AIDS literacy and treatment
literacy so that they can pass on that knowledge to learners
• Promotion of HIV testing to ‘know one’s status’
• Continuous evaluation of programme; tailor according to
fi ndings
• Advocacy at a broad level
• Integration of service delivery team at local schools levels
Build on
existing
services
• Integration of HIV elements into existing policies
rather than creation of stand-alone policies
• Adaptation of existing resources to respond to HIV-specifi c
needs
Community
involvement
• Policies developed in close consultation with
community members
• Development of strategies for including more men in
care and support system
• Policies to be socioculturally sensitive without
compromising the ethos of the programme
• Involvement of community leaders in planning process to
ensure ownership
• Identifi cation of care and support champions in the
community
• Recruitment and training of local volunteers and providing
incentives where possible
• Providing opportunities for continued professional
development for volunteering community members
• Undertaking thorough needs assessment of community on a
continuous basis
• Mapping local resources on a continuous basis
• Understanding local sociocultural issues and developing
activities
• Developing activities and incentives that will encourage
more men to get involved in the care and support system
• Advocacy on a broad level to ensure participation,
acceptance and ownership of the programme

26
As schools are unique places, with a primary focus on
educating children and young people, there will be
special considerations and implications for a care and
support system located here.
By the very nature of the defi nition of the terms ‘care’
and ‘support’ – promoting a person’s well-being through
medical, psychological, spiritual and other means(v)
– an environment that delivers either or both must be
a nurturing, safe and secure, as well as inclusive and
enabling.
The reality is that many schools in Southern Africa are
places where teachers struggle to deliver even a basic
curriculum to students with a wide range of needs, let
alone support their students in dealing with life issues
such as hunger, illness, treatment, death, abuse, shelter
and material needs. Further, in many schools, there
may not be a policy or measures in place that explicitly
ensure the protection and nurturing of children. In these
schools, teachers often have limited training; the learner
to educator ratio is often extremely high; teachers and
learners may be infected or affected by HIV; facilities
such as classrooms and sanitation are poor; and resources
are often limited.
It is clear that, if we are to encourage countries in
Southern Africa to consider schools as centres for
treatment, care and support as well as centres of
learning, we need to defi ne the kind of education and
school culture that includes both, or into which a care
and support system can feasibly be slotted.
Defi ning an enabling school culture and educational
foundation for treatment, care and support may have
implications for policy at national, district and individual
school levels. For example, such a defi nition may inform
how schools are run, as well as how and what students
are taught. It will affect staffi ng, resources, teacher
training and skills development, as well as what kind of
curriculum is delivered.
In order for a care and support system to be effective,
the school needs to encourage a culture and education
that:
Adheres to, and teaches about, human rights;
Delivers an education for the whole child, and
addresses the child’s well-being. That means the
inclusion of values education, health and sex
education, treatment education and the teaching
of life skills and critical thinking skills, as well as
vocational education;
Uses participatory teaching methods;
Recognises the importance of a fl exible curriculum
in the light of an epidemic or crisis;
Specifi cally has policies and measures in place
to ensure truly inclusive and egalitarian learning
environments in order to protect the rights of
all students and staff; these should particularly
address students with special educational needs,
students and staff with disabilities, those who
are infected with HIV and those students who
are orphaned or have missing parents, as well
as ensuring that girls and female staff have the
same opportunities as their male peers;
Specifi cally has a comprehensive child protection
policy in place to ensure safe and secure learning
environments for both students and staff.
‘No one player can respond to all
the needs of vulnerable children. We
therefore have to build networks for
coordinated and effective use of resources
at school and neighbourhood level.’
(v) Defi nition used by Rose Smart in Care, support and treatment for all education staff. UNESCO IIEP/MTT 2006. (Web reference http://portal.
unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=46881URL_DO=DO_TOPICURL_SECTION=201.html)

27
3.2 Child-centred programming
‘One of the greatest challenges was to
fi nd methodologies that keep children at
the heart of the programme and ones in
which children’s voices are heard.’
Female participant, Circles of Support
The concept of child-centred or child-friendly schools has
evolved over many years and goes much further than the
HIV response. However, child-centred programming is vital
to ensure that education is truly inclusive and rights-based.
It is crucial that services and structures are developed in
close consultation with those for whom the programme or
system is intended. The voices of children and young people
must be listened to, and their views must be integrated into
service delivery. Children need to be at the centre of any
programme design, implementation and monitoring.
Given the large body of literature on child-centred
schooling,[17-18] participants did not discuss this approach
in any great detail, but they did emphasise the absolute
necessity of placing this at the very core of all of their work.
It was also pointed out that a child-centred approach can
sometimes ignore the needs of educational staff or adult
community members when in fact those schools have a
role in supporting teachers and communities more broadly.
Schools need to support teachers in order for teachers to
support children but also in order to care for the welfare of
teachers themselves (see Box 6).
Box 6. Supporting teachers
Throughout the consultation, the importance of sup-porting
teachers was highlighted. The need for care
and support to be a shared responsibility of the school
and the rest of the community was unquestionable.
Participants stressed that teachers should be adequately
trained and have colleagues with whom they can share
their concerns. Again, the signifi cance of creating a
trusting, democratic and egalitarian school culture to
enable this kind of work was highlighted.
Teachers are important role models and have a responsi-bility
for educating and socialising the next generation
of children so that they become confi dent young adults.
However, if teachers themselves are unbalanced, over-worked
and feel out of control of their own lives, they
will not be able to deliver care and support and may
even take advantage of their power status. By support-ing
teachers, we are supporting children and ensuring
that their school is a learning environment, while at the
same time providing a place of care, support and safety.
3.3 Providing integrated services
‘A family should be able to get what it
needs based on particular circumstances.
Instead we have a crazy collection of
categorical programmes that have little
or nothing to do with families’ real
needs.’
If schools are to take on a role in the provision of
HIV-related treatment, care and support then the best
principle is to provide integrated services. This implies
a holistic package of services that complement each
other and that are likely to involve different types of
response and different sectors. As mentioned earlier, it
is unrealistic to expect schools to take responsibility
for all of these services. Instead, they can act as an
effective referral mechanism to other services.
Multisectoral response
Traditionally, the activities of schools are governed,
overseen and often funded by a country’s ministry of
education. However, if schools are to take on the role of
a centre for treatment, care and support, and in order to
enable a holistic and strong response to the many needs
of communities affected by HIV and AIDS, collaboration
between ministries such as health, agriculture, transport,
social development and education is necessary. Policy-making
needs to take place across departments, at all
levels, and funding needs to be joined together in such a
response. Currently, education budgets are overstretched
and cannot reasonably take on more responsibilities.
Schools as a link to services
Further, it is clear that, although schools can serve
as a centre for care and support, they will not be able
to reasonably deliver all aspects of a care and support
system. Schools may take on varying roles depending
upon the kinds of other services already available in a
community, resources at hand and the level of capacity
and support from within and outside the school. This is
another reason why partnerships are crucial in any care
and support system.
Schools may take on a delivery role for some services (for
example, life skills and values education, counselling,
feeding programmes). They may play a hosting role
for other services (for example, providing a venue
for treatment literacy programmes run by an NGO for

28
parents). In other cases, the school will take on the
role of facilitator (for example, offering a weekly test-clinic
run by others). Lastly, schools can refer to services
taking place elsewhere.
A key challenge for some schools may be that, due to lack
of capacity, they may only be able to take on the role of
referring young people to services outside of the school.
These services may either be limited, overstretched, not
youth-friendly or far from the school’s location. Where
possible, it is important to encourage health professionals
and social workers to visit schools on a regular basis to
provide localised, youth-friendly services under the roof
of the known and safe environment of the school (the
school in this case shifts from a referral to a facilitator
role). This is what is meant by integrated services, and
a strong need for this emerged as a priority for all target
groups.
3.4 Building on existing services
It is important that the care and support system links in
with any pre-existing community support structures, to
avoid duplication and competition between programmes
and to encourage community ownership. For example,
in the case of providing guidance and counselling, there
may not be a need to employ counsellors specifi cally to
deal with HIV and AIDS. If school counsellors already
exist, it might be more a case of training these existing
counsellors on the specifi c needs of HIV-affected
students and teachers. If school counsellors are not
available, it might be possible to link to counsellors
available through social services – either by referring
students to these services or by asking counsellors to
conduct sessions at school.
In many cases, there might not be government
provided counsellors, in which case volunteers can
be trained to provide some rudimentary counselling
as paraprofessionals. However, this is not always the
optimal solution, as it involves using unskilled people
in skilled positions. In some places, schools got by
with this system for many years through the use of
untrained teachers. However, it is important to refl ect
on how schools can make provision and cover for teacher
absenteeism, through the use of community personnel,
paraprofessionals or even responsible older students.
Care and support systems are generally far more
sustainable if based on local and government funding.
NGOs and other organizations may only be able to fund
a programme or part of a programme for a relatively
short time. The care and support system needs to be a
commitment that is put in place for as long as HIV and
AIDS exist in a community – and beyond.
However, there are many situations where external
funding is necessary simply because there is not enough
core funding. In such situations, the importance of
comprehensive exit strategies cannot be underestimated.
Plans for enabling the longevity of a whole programme
have to be built into the planning process and be
implemented right from the start of a programme, not
when funding runs out.
3.5 Involving communities
‘The Circles of Support programmes
are based on the assumption that
communities have a lot to offer in terms
of support. The challenge was to see if it
was possible to create support networks
for children using schools as an “in” – as
an intervention loci for support and care.’
Circles of Support participant
One of the underlying principles of the work that has
been happening in Southern Africa is that HIV and AIDS
are everybody’s problem and yet nobody can deal with
the crisis alone. The rationale behind many models of
school-based care and support is that a large number of
resources exist in the community that can be harnessed
to support the school, and vice versa.
Involving the community
It is evident that generating local support and resources
will ensure ownership of the care and support system at
community grass-roots level, and at the same time reduce

29
the level of external dependency. It was also reported
that the realisation of care and support programmes
by using local resources had had an empowering and
positive effect on schools and communities at large.
Many had achieved positive, visible results simply by
coming together as a community and working together
towards common goals.
Partnerships should be developed also at district and
local levels. This is necessary for community ownership,
support for the school and the identifi cation of local
resources (skills, volunteers and material and monetary
contributions) to set up and sustain the care and support
system over the long term. It is important that all areas
of a community are invited to take an active role within
the decision-making process (encouraging decentralised
decision making and democratic approaches) and delivery
of the programme. Partnerships may be forged between
schools and community leaders, local businesses, farmers,
faith-based organizations, NGOs and institutions with a
particular focus on health and well-being. Partnerships
are often fragile unless mechanisms are in place for
strengthening these and ensuring that commitment is
over the long term.
Involving teachers’ unions
‘More often than not, teachers living with
HIV have been sidelined and important
decisions made on their behalf, which at
times have little benefi t to them. Nothing
about us without us!’
Male participant, Zambia
Participants noted that, in terms of protecting the
welfare of HIV-positive teachers, teachers’ unions hold
a privileged position that complements government
support. Teachers place trust in the unions to protect
their welfare, and unions have a special role in ensuring
that all teachers are treated without discrimination.[19]
In Zambia, the Zambia National Union of Teachers (ZNUT)
is working closely with networks of teachers living with
HIV and is encouraging the active participation of HIV-positive
teachers within the union.
As part of this campaign, over 250 teachers have publicly
declared their HIV status in the Southern Province of
Zambia. Not only has this helped the teachers on an
individual level, it has also had a wider impact on the
students and communities: ZNUT has noticed a much
wider acceptance by students and their parents of HIV-positive
teachers and an increase in disclosure of HIV-positive
students.
3.6 Issues of sustainability and
scaling up
Scaling up programmes introduces a range of challenges
in management, including new contexts and specifi c
needs, and issues of funding and sustainability.
One of they key challenges for scaling up is to ensure
quality when a programme is to be expanded. It is
important to retain the core components and values (or
ethos) of the initial effort or ‘pilot’ when adapting the
processes and methodologies of a programme. This may
be a particular issue when it comes to the cost of scaling
up. Small, well-run programmes are often perceived to
be too expensive when taken to scale.
Many of the principles outlined above will help to
increase the likelihood of sustainability –
especially community participation – building on existing
resources and ensuring that efforts are child-centred.
Building upon existing policies and programmes will
help to ensure the institutionalisation of support within
government and within national and local policies,
plans, budgets and expenditure frameworks and will
encourage ownership of the approach. Related to this
point (and already mentioned) is the suggestion of
avoiding the creation of HIV-specifi c programmes, but
instead integrating HIV into existing programmes. This
is conceptually a better approach, since it avoids the
further singling-out and potential stigmatisation of
children affected by HIV and AIDS.
Although it is crucial for any programme to be child-centred,
one challenge in terms of scaling up is that
some approaches focus too much on individual children.
Hence, it is possible for a project to claim to have
assisted a certain number of children each year, but
a more sustainable approach would be to identify the
underlying obstacles that are preventing the child from
accessing school and tackling these issues. This approach
is taken by The Children’s Institute in South Africa:
‘Any school programme needs to be
supported by deep systemic social and
economic change in order to achieve
long-term sustainable change for social
justice. We need to prioritise action
rather than just individual children.’

30
Involving men in care and support
systems
The lack of participation by men and boys in care and
support systems represents a particular challenge. As
much as gender roles are changing in many places, it
may be necessary to include strategies to ensure an
increase in the number of men taking an active role in
care and support.
Women and girls living in communities affected by HIV
and AIDS are typically taking on a disproportionate share
of the responsibilities to support their communities by
working extra hours in a school or in their neighbourhoods,
by caring for the sick, by fostering or adopting orphans,
by being the main producers of meals and by managing
households.
The reasons why men and boys may not participate could
be because they see care and support as traditional
female roles, or regard themselves as ‘providers’ rather
than ‘caregivers’. These are roles into which both men
and women are socialised, and if changes are to be
made, children must be socialised differently at home as
well as at school.
Strategies for ensuring the participation of more men
and boys in care and support programmes include:
Ensuring that boys and girls are treated the same
at school, e.g. establishing an egalitarian, rights-based
democratic school culture. Education is
supposed to empower and encourage critical
thinking skills and questioning. This does not
mean that school has to be divisive and radical.
Giving boys care and support roles and
responsibilities at school.
Initially recruiting men and boys to roles in the
care and support system, where they can be
noticed, for example, sports team leader as part
of psychosocial support, or making or building
things. When they are involved, encourage
their strengths to build further confi dence and
self-esteem, and suggest new tasks/further
involvement.
Enrolling men to enrol other men – initial role
models or champions are needed.
Convincing men of the ‘rigorousness’ of care and
support structures. We should not look to re-label
‘care’ and ‘support’ in order to attract more men.
Volunteers
A key challenge reported across pilot programmes is the
heavy reliance on both school-based and community
volunteers. Not only are teachers working long hours
outside their teaching responsibilities, but members
of the community are giving up extensive time, for
example, to assess needs, mobilise funds or provide
psychosocial support. It was suggested that, where
possible, incentives should be offered to volunteers,
training schemes offered to paraprofessionals and paid
roles should be funded by government departments.
Table 4 shows some of the other challenges raised in
terms of scaling up HIV and AIDS treatment, care and
support programmes in schools.

Table 4. Challenges to scaling up treatment, care and support programmes in schools
Knowledge gaps • Identifying the complex and dynamic range of risk and protective factors
31
impacting on children
• Lack of documenting processes, monitoring and evaluation
• Many positive outcomes of projects are of qualitative nature and diffi cult to
measure
• Research is needed that is geared towards improving planning
Challenges to
implementation
• Developing programmes based on critical needs assessment
• Lack of support for HIV-positive teachers and other education personnel
• Stigma and discrimination continue to be major obstacles
• It is more diffi cult to implement in secondary schools than primary schools
• Lack of implementation tools
• Lack of a steady stream of long-term sustainable funding to communities
• Most programmes are small in scale, with little or no attention to rigorous
monitoring and evaluation
Challenges to
scaling up
• Lack of costed models that governments can take up
• Small NGO models that rely on volunteers are probably not sustainable
• Lack of rigorously evaluated interventions
• Lack of documentation on programme processes, especially relating to challenges
and how they were overcome
• How to ensure community participation and ownership within a government
driven scaled up programme
• Some NGO models are effective but too labour intensive to be scaled up
• Systems and strategies for identifying and supporting children who need help
are generally weak; referral systems are particularly weak and social services are
overburdened
• ever increasing demands on an ever increasing fragile of the education sector?
Lack of harmonised
action
• Insuffi cient attention to the issue of OVC by regional and national bodies
• Lack of coordination of efforts leading to duplication
• Inadequate knowledge sharing between stakeholders
• Poor communication between communities, local, national and international
groups
Challenge of
targeting
• Concentration of capacity-building activities in capital city when need is in other
areas
• Developing effective systems for identifying children in need of support without
stigmatisation

4. CONCLUSONS AND
RECOMMENDATIONS
32
Schools in Southern Africa have no choice but to respond
to the impact of HIV and AIDS on educational staff,
learners and local communities. The challenges and
needs are daunting and multifaceted. However, schools
offer an unparalleled resource in many communities for
supporting the scaling up of HIV services. Failure to do
so is already undermining efforts to achieve Education
for All (EFA) in the region.
At the same time, it is important to bear in mind how
overburdened education systems are in the region. In
many countries, the education system is struggling
with competing priorities and does not necessarily see
HIV-related care and support as its role. Government
offi cials, school principals and teachers perennially
battle for the human and material resources simply to
provide basic education in less than perfect conditions.
Add an additional burden in the form of responding to a
stigmatised disease – an added and perhaps confusing
responsibility in terms of prevention, care and support
– and it is likely that there may be some reluctance to
fully engage in the issue.
This is not an excuse for inaction. The unfortunate reality
across Southern Africa is that learners and educators
have a huge range of needs: some of these existed
without HIV and others are HIV-specifi c. The impacts
of AIDS are threefold – highlighting existing problems,
enlarging ongoing problems and creating new problems.
Schools need to respond to these needs, both to protect
the basic functioning of the system (so that teachers
keep teaching and students attend classes and learn)
but also as part of the wider responsibility to respond to
HIV and AIDS. Failure to do so will undermine efforts to
achieve both the EFA goals in the region as well as the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).[20]

33
4.1 Common elements
While HIV and AIDS treatment, care and support clearly
have special considerations that need to be addressed,
schools and communities also grapple with an array of
social problems that are related to HIV: both in terms of
vulnerability to infection and the success of the response.
Therefore, it is important to look at an integrated and
multidimensional care and support system. And also there
is need to adopt an approach that is holistic, does not
focus exclusively on HIV and AIDS, but sees the AIDS-related
problems as related to a whole network of other
problems and challenges in the community and school.
Key elements of an integrated school-based treatment,
care and support programme include:
Ensuring the continuation of
education
Maintaining the provision of education for children is the
overarching objective of the education system. In the
context of high HIV prevalence rates, this is increasingly
diffi cult because HIV compounds the diffi culties that
communities were already experiencing. Specifi c strategies
to ensure the continuation of education include:
Monitoring children’s attendance and some
rudimentary indicators of vulnerability;
Conducting home visits to encourage children
who are not enrolled to enrol;
Waiving school fees or providing scholastic
support such as uniform, pens or books;
Making lessons more fl exible to suit the needs
of students who might be working or have care
duties in the household.
Providing psychosocial support
In addition to strategies to ensure that all children stay
at school, it may also be necessary to provide specialised
psychosocial support to HIV-affected children. This in
itself is a strategy for ensuring that children stay at
school and also a strategy for ensuring that children can
actually learn. Specifi c examples include:
Training existing counsellors to understand the
impact of HIV and AIDS on students;
Referring vulnerable children to social services or
NGOs that provide psychosocial support;
Alerting teachers to the needs of vulnerable
children and providing some elementary support
to children.
Universal precautions
Because very often people do not know they are infected
with HIV or other infectious blood borne infections
including hepatitis, it is important to have in place
policies and procedures for safely managing accidents
and injuries at schools (known as universal precautions).
To reduce fear and discrimination, schools need to inform
all staff and students about the infection-control policy
and address concerns through open discussion.
Treatment education
A growing number of teachers and students are HIV-positive
and schools therefore need to respond to a
number of related issues:
Supporting HIV-positive students and teachers to
take treatment;
Supporting teachers and students to visit medical
centres for frequent check-ups (and providing
cover for absent teachers);
Understanding ART side effects and how these
might impact on a teacher’s ability to teach or a
student’s ability to learn;
Adapting HIV and AIDS curriculum to include
information on treatment so that students are
not taught out-of-date information. Literacy
education for the treatment of TB, malaria,
intestinal illnesses and other health areas is
equally important. Singling out HIV and AIDS will
ultimately only add to the possibility of stigma;
Teaching students about treatment so that they
are better able to support their parents and
families in accessing and adhering to treatment.
Home-based care and education
In many schools across Southern Africa, teachers and
students are providing outreach work to support sick
community members. Very broadly, this support can
be categorised as students supporting sick community
members or teachers providing home-based education to
sick students.

34
Responding to basic needs
In many parts of Southern Africa, communities are
dealing with the compounded effects of HIV, poverty and
hunger. What role do schools play in meeting these basic
physical needs? Many people believe schools are not an
ideal context for the provision of basic needs. However, it
is clear that some schools are achieving positive results
with communities by, for example, creating vegetable
gardens and providing school feeding programmes.
Developing livelihood skills
When parents fall sick and die as a result of AIDS, their
children can be marginalised and vital agricultural
knowledge and life-skills may not be passed down, leaving
children vulnerable to hunger, malnutrition and illness.
Some schools have developed livelihood programmes to
improve children’s skills in terms of livelihood support
and food security.
4.2 Successful principles
Five broad principles have been identifi ed that should
all be in place in order to provide a comprehensive
response to treatment, care and support, which in turn
will reinforce prevention efforts.
Developing a caring school
environment
By the very nature of defi ning the terms ‘care’ and
‘support’, an environment that delivers either or both
must be nurturing, safe and secure, inclusive and
enabling. This includes:
Adhering to and teaching about human rights;
Delivering an education for the whole child, and
addressing the well-being of a child. That means
the inclusion of spiritual and values education,
emotional education, health and sex education,
treatment education and the teaching of life
skills and critical thinking skills;
Using participatory teaching methods;
Recognising the importance of a fl exible
curriculum in light of an epidemic or crisis;
Specifi cally putting policies and measures in
place to ensure truly inclusive and egalitarian
learning environments in order to protect the
rights of all students and staff but especially
those most vulnerable, such as students with
special educational needs, students and staff
with disabilities, those who are infected with HIV
and AIDS, and those students who are orphaned
or have missing parents; and ensuring that girls
and female staff have the same opportunities as
their male peers;
Specifi cally has a comprehensive child protection
policy in place to ensure safe and secure learning
environments for both students and staff.
Schools as a centre for integrated
service delivery
Schools need to plan a holistic package of services that
complement each other and that involve multisectoral
responses. Schools will not necessarily be able to deliver
all of the services but can take on varying roles depending
upon the kinds of other services already available in a
community, resources at hand and the level of capacity
and support from within and outside the school.
Health-care professionals and social workers to
collaborate closely with schools and visit schools
frequently and routinely;
Schools to refer learners, school staff and members
of community to services outside school;
Schools to host services delivered by other
departments and organizations;
Create opportunities for networking;
Assessment and harnessing of local needs and
resources;
Opportunity for continued professional development
for professionals and paraprofessionals to learn skills
across sectors;
Assess and monitor service receivers;
Teachers, school staff and community volunteers
and staff members to be trained on HIV and
AIDS;
Encourage the wider use of HIV testing and
counselling services to know one’s HIV status.

35
Child-centred programming
Any school-based care and support system must include
the whole school and all children, to ensure that those
infected or affected by HIV and AIDS are not stigmatised.
Having said this, the needs of both those infected and
affected must have a high priority within the care and
support system, as these learners will be both physically
and emotionally challenged. Recommendations include:
Providing support that is material but also deals
with emotional problems faced by children;
Creating spaces for children’s voices to be heard;
Respecting the rights of the child (accorded by
the Convention on the Rights of the Child)
Creating networks of support for children;
Training teachers how to identify and care for
vulnerable children;
Creating a monitoring system for vulnerable
children.
Build on existing services
It is important that the care and support system links
in with any pre-existing community support structures,
to avoid duplication and competition between
programmes and to encourage community ownership.
Recommendations include:
Existing resources to be adapted to respond to
HIV-specifi c needs;
HIV elements to be integrated into existing
policies rather than be created as stand-alone
policies.
Involve communities
One of the underlying principles of the work that has
been happening in Southern Africa is that HIV and AIDS
are everybody’s problem and yet nobody can deal with
the crisis alone. The rationale behind many models of
school-based care and support is that a large number of
resources exist in the community that can be harnessed
to support the school and vice versa.
Further, it is evident that generating local support and
resources will ensure ownership of the care and support
system at community grass-roots level, and at the same
time reduce the level of external dependency.
Recommendations include:
Invite and involve community leaders in planning
processes to ensure ownership;
Identify care and support champions in the
community;
Recruit and train local volunteers and provide
incentives, where possible;
Provide opportunities for continued professional
development for volunteering community
members;
Undertake thorough needs assessment of
community on a continuous basis;
Advocate widely to ensure participation,
acceptance and ownership of the programme.
In addition, special strategies are needed to involve men
and boys in care and support. These include:
Ensuring that boys and girls are treated the same
at school, e.g. establish an egalitarian, rights-based
democratic school culture. Education is
supposed to empower and encourage critical
thinking skills and questioning. This does not
mean that school has to be divisive and radical;
Giving boys care and support roles and
responsibilities at school;
Initially recruiting men and boys to roles in the
care and support system, where they can be
noticed; for example, sports team leader as part
of psychosocial support component, or making
or building things. When they are involved,
encourage their strengths to build further
confi dence and self-esteem, and suggest new
tasks/further involvement;
Enrolling men to enrol other men; initial role
models or champions are needed;
Convincing men of the ‘rigorousness’ of care and
support structures. We should not look to re-label
‘care’ and ‘support’ in order to attract more men.

36
R e f e r e n c e s
[1] Southern Africa Development Community (SADC).
2005. Communiqué. Essential services for children.
Care and support in schools. http://www.dfa.gov.
za/docs/2005/sadc0823.htm (Accessed 23 August
2007).
[2] Ainsworth, M., Beegle, K. and Koda, G. 2002.
The Impact of Adult Mortality on Primary School
Enrollment in Northwestern Tanzania. Washington,
D.C., World Bank, p. 23. http://siteresources.
worldbank.org/AFRICAEXT/Resources/tz_adult_
mortality.pdf (Accessed 23 August 2007).
[3] Bicego, G., Rutstein, S. and Johnson, K. 2003.
Dimensions of the emerging orphan crisis in sub-
Saharan Africa. Social Science and Medicine, Vol.
56, No. 6, pp. 1235–47. http://www.sciencedirect.
com/science?_ob=ArticleURL_udi=B6VBF-
45NY293-2_user=10_coverDate=03%2F3
1%2F2003_rdoc=1_fmt=_orig=search_
sort=dview=c_acct=C000050221_version=1_
urlVersion=0_userid=10md5=f3f807cc378062d0
a4d9ef4ffce5ec8a (Accessed 23 August 2007).
[4] Boler, T. and Carroll, K. 2004. Addressing the
Educational Needs of Orphans and Vulnerable
Children. London, Save the Children and ActionAid
International. http://www.actionaid.org/assets/
pdf/HIVorphans.pdf (Accessed on 23 August
2007).
[5] Case, A., Paxman, C. and Abledinger, J. 2004.
Orphans in Africa: parental death, poverty and
school enrollment. Demography, Vol. 41, No. 3,
pp. 483–508. http://www.princeton.edu/~rpds/
downloads/case_paxson_orphansafrica.pdf
(Accessed on 23 August 2007).
[6] Boler, T. 2007. Facing the consequences of AIDS:
orphans, cash grants and educational outcomes in
South Africa. London, London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine.
[7] Gould, W. et al. 2002. Primary School Attendance
in Tanzania - how far is it affected by orphanhood?
University of Liverpool, Annual Conference of the
British Society for Population Studies.
[8] Boler, T. and Jellema, A. 2005. Deadly Inertia: a
cross country study of educational responses to
HIV/AIDS. Johannesburg, Global Campaign for
Education. http://www.ibe.unesco.org./AIDS/doc/
Deadlyinertia_353_EN.pdf (Accessed on 23 August
2007).
[9] ActionAid. 2003. Global Education Review. London,
ActionAid.
[10] Al-Samarria, S. 2002. Achieving education for
all: how much does money matter? University of
Sussex, Institute of Development Studies. http://
mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/118/01/MPRA_paper_
118.pdf (Accessed on 23 August 2007).
[11] Elimu Yetu Coalition. 2005. The challenge
of educating girls in Kenya. In: Aikman, S.
and Unterhalter, E. (editors). Beyond Access.
Transforming policy and practice for gender equality
in education. Oxford, Oxfam GB. http://www.
oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/resources/downloads/
BA_7.pdf (Accessed on 23 August 2007).
[12] Lockwood, M. 2006. The State They’re In. An
agenda for international action on poverty in
Africa. London, Viewpoints.
[13] Ainsworth, M. and Filmer, D. 2002. Poverty, AIDS,
and Children’s Schooling. Washington, D.C., World
Bank, p. 41. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.
cfm?abstract_id=636246 (Accessed on 23 August
2007).
[14] Bennell, P., Hyde, K. and Swainson N. 2002. The
Impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the Education
Sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. University of Sussex,
Centre for International Education.
[15] UNESCO. 2006. HIV and AIDS treatment education.
Technical consultation report. Paris, UNESCO.
[16] World Health Organization (WHO). 2006. Universal
Precautions, including injection safety. Geneva,
WHO.
[17] UNICEF. 2005. Children on the Brink. New York,
UNICEF. http://www.unicef.org/publications/fi les/
cob_layout6-013.pdf (Accessed on 23 August
2007).
[18] United Nations. 2006. UN Study on Violence
against children. United Nations. http://www.
violencestudy.org/r229 (Accessed on 23 August
2007).
[19] UNESCO. 2007. Supporting HIV-positive teachers in
East and Southern Africa. Paris, UNESCO.
[20] UNAIDS Inter-Agency Task Team (IATT) on
Education. 2003. HIV/AIDS and education: a
strategic approach. Paris, UNESCO. http://unesdoc.
unesco.org/images/0012/001286/128657e.pdf
(Accessed on 23 August 2007).

A n ne x : P a r t i c i p a n t s L i s t
37
Peter Badcock-Walters
Edusector AIDS Response Trust
29 Winston Road
Kloof
Durban
South Africa
E-mail: peterbw@eastcoast.co.za
Tumisang J. Baruti
National Commission of Botswana for UNESCO
Private Bag 005
Gaborone
Botswana
E-mail: tbaruti@gov.bw
Tania Boler
UNESCO Paris
Division for the Coordination of UN Priorities in
Education
Education Sector
UNESCO
7 Place de Fontenoy
75007 Paris
France
E-mail: t.boler@unesco.org
Nicol Colling-Cave
Soul City
PO Box 1290
Houghton 2041
South Africa
E-mail: nicol@soulcity.org.za
Nancy
Coulson
Health and Development Africa (HDA)
2 Greenhill Road
Emmarewna
Johannesbourg
South Africa
E-mail: ncoulson@hda.co.za
Elizabeth Makhunou Fembo
Kanye Education Centre
Minsitry of Education
Private Bag 003
Kanye
Botswana
E-mail: efembo@gov.bw
Jodie Fonseca
Save the Children
2000 M Street NW
Washington DC, 20036
USA
E-mail: jfonseca@dc.savechildren.org
Thulisile Ganyaza-Twalo
Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC)
63-89 Plein Street, Plein Park Building
Cape Town 8000
South Africa
E-mail: tganyaza-twalo@hserc.ac.za
Sue Godt
UNICEF Nairobi
Box 44145
00100 Nairobi
Kenya
E-mail: sgodt@unicef.org
Ursula Hoadley
Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC)
Plein Street
Cape Town 8001
South Africa
E-mail: uhoadley@hsrc.ac.za
Erison Huruba
Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture
PO Box CY121, Causeway
Harare
Zimbabwe
E-mail: ehuruba@yahoo.com
Jyotsna Jha
Social Transformation Programme Division
Commonwealth Secretariat
Marlborough House, Pall Mall
London SW1Y 5HX
United Kingdom
E-mail: j.jha@commonwealth.int
Emily Johnsson
35 Pilgrim’s Lane
London NW3 1SS
United Kingdom
E-mail: emilyjohnsson@hotmail.com

38
Michael Kelly
Jesuits
Luwisha House
5880 Great East Road
Box 25391
Lusaka
Zambia
E-mail: mjkelly@jesuits.org.zm
Audrey Kgosidimtsi
Institute of Development Management (IDM)
Box 60167
Gaborone
Botswana
E-mail: akgosidimtsi@idmbls.com
Thatayotlhe Kutuso
Primary Department
Ministry of Education
Private Bag 119
Gaborone
Botswana
E-mail: tkutuso@gov.bw
Lethola Mafi sa
Ministry of Education and Training
PO Box 47
Maseru 100
Lesotho
E-mail: mafi sal@education.gov.ls
Rangarirai Mahachi
Zimbabwe Red Cross Society
No 10 St. Annes Avondale
Harare
Zimbabwe
E-mail: rangariraimahachi@yahoo.com
Thelma Kgakgamatso Majela
Private Bag 501
Gaborone
Botswana
E-mail: tmajela@gov.bw
Christoforos Mallouris
UNESCO Paris
Division for the Coordination of UN Priorities in
Education
Education Sector
UNESCO
7 Place de Fontenoy
75007 Paris
France
E-mail: c.mallouris@unesco.org
Mmamiki Mamanakao
UNICEF Gaborone
Box 20678
Gaborone
Botswana
E-mail: mkamanakao@unicef.org
Tizie Maphalala
UNICEF Zambia
Lusaka
Zambia
E-mail: tmaphalala@unicef.org
Nkhensani Mavasa
Treatment Action Campaign (TAC)
3 Church Street
Muizeberg 7945
South Africa
E-mail: nkhensani@tac.org.za
John, C. Mswayo
Ministry of Education and Vocational Training
Private Bag 328
Lilongwe
Malawi
E-mail: mswayo2005@yahoo.com
Fadzai Mukonoweshuro
Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)
PO Box 3732
6th fl oor Old Mutual Centre, 3rd Street
Harare
Zimbabwe
E-mail: fadzai.mukonoweshuro@fao.org
Roy Mwaba
Zambia National Union of Teachers (ZNUT)
Ben Bella Road
PO Box 31914,
Lusaka
Zambia
E-mail: znut@zamtel.zm
Daniel Mwansa
CINDI-Kitwe
6 Kabengele Road
Box 21664
Kitwe
Zambia
E-mail: mwansa2dc@yahoo.com
Louis Nawa
OSIGA/UNESCO Southern Africa EFA Project
PO Box 50619
Lusaka
Zambia
E-mail: nawalouis@yahoo.com

39
Marian Nell
Nell and Shapiro cc
27 Eight St.
Parkmore
South Africa
E-mail: nellshap@hixnet.co.za
Dikeledi Maureen Ramagaga
Department of Teacher Training and Development
Private Bag 00188
Gaborone
Botswana
E-mail: dramagaga@gov.bw
Norma Rudolph
Children’s Institute
Sawkins Road, Randebosche
Western Cape
South Africa
E-mail: norma.rudolph@uct.ac.za
Pamela Shao
UN World Food Programme
Via del Conservatorio 1
00148 Rome
Italy
E-mail: pamela.shao@wfp.org
Havelinus N. Shemuketa
Private Bag 2028
Ondangwa
Namibia
E-mail: oshikoto@hamu-nam.net
Rose Smart
21 Cowan Road
Hilton 3201
South Africa
E-mail: rsmart@netactive.co.za
Emma Tuahepa
Lironga Eparu
61592 Katutura
Namibia
E-mail: kamapoha@iway.na
Lynn Van der Elst
The Media in Education Trust (MiET)
357 King George V Avenue, CSIR Building, Francois
Road
Durban
South Africa
E-mail: lynn@miet.co.za
Roselyn Wabuge-Mwangi
UNESCO Harare
8 Kenilworth Road, Newlands
Harare
Zimbabwe
E-mail: r.wabuge-mwangi@unesco.org
Kennedy Warren
UNICEF Malawi
Box 30375
Lilongwe 3
Malawi
E-mail: kwarren@unicef.org
Memory Zulu
UNESCO Harare
8 Kenilworth Road, Newlands
Harare
Zimbabwe
E-mail: m.zulu@unesco.org

Photo credits:
Cover: © Media in Education Trust (MiET) Africa/
Roy Reed 2006
p.5: © MiET/Roy Reed 2004
The photos taken from the fi lm Schools as
Centres of Care and Support: Setting up a school
support team (October 2006), produced by
Tekweni Television Productions, are provided with
courtesy of MiET.
All © MiET, October 2006:
p.7: A teacher supporting a student with his
school work
p.8: Classroom in an SCCS programme
participating school
p.17, top photo: School feeding programme in
an SCCS participating school
bottom photo: A child during a home-visit
by a teacher
p.19: Students in an SCCS programme
p.20: Developing an action plan by the school
support team
p.26: Developing an action plan by the school
support team
p.28: Parents’ participation in the school care
and support programme
p.30: Discussion between two teachers, members
of the school support team, regarding
identifi cation of vulnerable children in the
community
The photos taken from the fi lm Schools as
Centres of Care and Support (2006), produced by
Tekweni Television Productions, are provided with
courtesy of MiET.
All © MiET, 2006:
p.13, top photo: Student in an SCCS programme
bottom photo: Peer support
p.25: Student walking to school
p.32: © MTT/HEARD/Wendy Heard 2005
from the report Education Access and
Retention for Educationally Marginalised
Children: Innovations in Social Protection
(MTT/HEARD and UNICEF, 2005)

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