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| Whizz Kids United | ||
Leadership: Marcus McGilvary Website: www.whizzkidsunited.org
Despite great socioeconomic progress in the past two decades, South Africa remains in the grip of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, with nearly 6 million HIV-infected individuals. This deadly disease decimates the labour force, burdens the healthcare system, and leaves behind orphans and heartbroken families. |
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Young people have a particularly high risk of infection, and youth prevention campaigns to date have been ineffective. Most school-based prevention programmes focus on ‘awareness’ without addressing the social factors that really drive HIV risk behaviour, and surveys show that kids find them unimaginative and boring. Enter WhizzKids United (WKU), an exceptional youth HIV prevention programme built on a solid foundation of theory and practical experience. In the world of WKU, the classroom is a grassy pitch and the language of instruction is football (soccer)! Football drills and activities are used to teach essential knowledge and skills by using the game of football as a metaphor for life. Both girls and boys are engaged with this fun, interactive approach which covers such important topics as goal setting, gender norms, peer pressure, self-efficacy for using condoms, and stigma. Outstanding learners from the Life Skills Football Course are then trained to run WKU’s inspired Peer Education programme, through which kids cooperate to redefine their peer group’s norms of sexual behaviour. To provide long-term support for the behaviour change initiated by these two school-based interventions, WKU seeks to build Health Academies, which are teen clinics designed to provide adolescent-friendly health services (AFHS) such as voluntary counselling and testing, STI treatment and referral, rape crisis counselling and referral, and ARV treatment and psychosocial support for HIV-infected teens. WKU has been operating since 2006 in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’s hardest-hit province with a youth HIV incidence rate of 14.1%. The programme has the enthusiastic endorsement of the KZN Premier’s Office and has recently partnered with the KZN Department of Health to build its first Health Academy.
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