A Cape Town-based NGO, Gold Peer Education Development Agency, has designed a programme for the youth to educate their peers on how to prevent further spreading of HIV/Aids.
This saw the agency winning the first prize of the inaugural Commonwealth Good Practice Awards — held in Cape Town late last year during the conference of commonwealth education ministers. It beat eight other organisations in the category of ‘helping education in difficult circumstances”.
Gold (an acronym for Generation of Leaders Discovered), has a vision to see a generation of young African leaders confronting the root issues of the HIV/Aids pandemic through uplifting their communities.
From 2002 to 2004, the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) HIV/Aids and Life Skills Unit supported a process whereby seven NGOs were able to draw their education together to be developed into a common model for all to implement in the future.
During this period, the organisations and WCED agreed that an independent organisation should be established to be the custodian of the common model and the Gold Peer Education Development Agency was therefore created.
Gold’s executive director, Susannah Farr, said the three-year programme draws its peer educators from secondary school learners from grade 10 to 12. She said they see youth as agents of transformation as they are better placed to help drive home the message about the impact of Aids.
So far the project has been operating in the Western Cape, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Botswana. Farr said their victory was a product of the collaboration they had with grassroots organisations and the communities.