Today, nearly forty million people are living with HIV. Experts agree that education could help limit the further spread of the pandemic. Yet many countries are slow to put in place a coherent HIV and AIDS prevention education plan.

In order to expand educational opportunities for girls and orphans and reduce their risk of contracting HIV infection, the Global AIDS Alliance recommends: Eliminate School-Related Fees.

Growing evidence shows that getting and keeping young people in school, particularly girls, dramatically lowers their vulnerability to HIV. By itself, merely attending primary school makes young people significantly less likely to contract HIV.

This material was prepared as part of UNESCO's contribution to the 2004 World AIDS Campaign "Girls, Women, HIV and AIDS", aimed at enhancing capacity of the education system to deal with the impact of the HIV/AIDS on quality education, and quality education's response to it.

The Y.E.A.H.

This workbook is designed to help you advocate for a comprehensive approach to combating HIV and AIDS in the education sector. The frameworks, examples and worksheets provided here will guide you in designing an advocacy strategy to inform and influence policymakers and your colleagues.

This is the year that the world will miss the first, and most critical of all the Millennium Development Goals - gender parity in education by 2005.

The world must take urgent account of the specific impact of AIDS on children, or there will be no chance of meeting Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 6 - to halt and begin to reverse the spread of the disease by 2015.

Children make up half the population of many African countries, and the proportion is growing. Yet, when it comes to decisions about Africa's problems and its future, they are rarely central to the debate.

This document was published by the Child-to-Child Trust in 2005. This book advocates and aims to strengthen the provision of good quality health education for all children.