Evaluation of a comprehensive school-based AIDS education programme in rural Masaka, Uganda

A 19 activity extracurricular school-based AIDS education programme lasting 1 year was conducted in rural southwestern Uganda using specially trained teachers, and was evaluated using mutually supportive quantitative and qual itative methods. In total, 1274 students from 20 intervention schools and 8 03 students from 11 control schools completed questionnaires at baseline, a nd their classes were followed up. In addition, 93 students from five of th e intervention schools participated in 12 focus group discussions. The prog ramme had very little effect-seven of the nine key questionnaire variables showed no significant increase in score after the intervention. Data from t he focus group discussions suggest that the programme was incompletely impl emented, and that key activities such as condoms and the role-play exercise s were covered only very superficially. The main reasons for this were a sh ortage of classroom time, as well as teachers' fear of controversy and the unfamiliar. We conclude that large-scale comprehensive school-based AIDS ed ucation programmes in sub-Saharan Africa may be more completely implemented if they are fully incorporated into national curricula and examined as par t of life-skills education. This would require teachers to be trained in pa rticipatory teaching methods while still at training college.