Standards for Peers Education Programmes is a guide developed by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) Unified Budget Workplan, with separate funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to Family Health International (FHI)/YouthNet. The document raises the issue of how to standardize peer education. It results from the three-day consultation on standards in peer education held on November 8-10 in Moscow. During the consultation, 45 participants (peer educators, trainers, and managers working in peer education) from 22 countries worked with a facilitation team of international experts to develop minimal standards for peer education programmes. It focuses on the importance of peer education to implement youth reproductive health and HIV prevention programme. By promoting standards in peer education programmes, the guide tries to provides a consensus of expert thinking and tested experience, a framework for quality assurance, a guidance in programme design and implementation, a framework for monitoring and evaluation and a basis for certification. This guide can be used by programme designers and programme managers, as well as by top managers overseeing larger peer education initiatives. It is also a basic reference and guidance tool for supervisors, trainers, and peer educators themselves. How the tool is used depends on the stage of the programme - it can be used to design a new programme or offer guidance about assessment and quality improvement once the programme is well under way. The guide is organized to be user-friendly for various readers and purposes. Section 2 provides a chart of the standards themselves with a brief description of what it means for those standards to be met. The chart is organized by programme phase: planning, recruitment and retention, training and supervision, management and oversight, and monitoring and evaluation. This format introduces the fundamentals for each standard and can serve as a practical reference document or checklist. Section 3 offers a more detailed discussion of the standards. It presents tips to ensuring that the standards are met and some challenges, lessons learned, issues to consider, and examples of how peer programmes from around the world have addressed various standards. The code of ethics (Section 4) is recommended as anintegral part of the standards; it can be made into a poster or reference sheet for distribution to staff and peer educators.