The Effectiveness of HIV/AIDS Education in Promoting Counseling to the Youth in Secondary Schools in Kenya

Abstract

The main objective of HIV/AIDS education is to necessitate HIV prevention among the youth through behavior development and or modification. This implies that HIV/AIDS education is supposed to not only be a medium of creating awareness but also most importantly promote practices and skills to enable HIV prevention among youth in schools. This article reports on a study whose purpose was to assess the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS education in promoting counseling in secondary schools. Specifically, the study sought to find out the extent to which counseling promotion for HIV/AIDS prevention were emphasized to youth; and explore the factors that influenced the promotion of counseling for HIV/AIDS prevention to the youth. The findings of the study established that counseling services were underutilized in schools. The concept of counseling was not well understood. Guidance services were over utilized at the detriment of counseling. Despite the fact that school counselors were not adequately trained, utilization of referral was low. Factors that influenced promotion of counseling were the counselor's personal attributes, age gap between the students and their counselors, gender of the counselor, double roles of counseling and discipline that teacher counselors were assigned, insufficient time for the counseling teachers to execute this duty and inadequate training to the counselors. The study recommended the need to explore strategies for enhancing counseling in schools as an HIV/AIDS prevention intervention. The results of this study will hopefully contribute to knowledge on how the HIV/AIDS education programme can be adapted to integrate counseling that has the potential to improve the capacity of the programme in meeting the HIV/AIDS prevention needs and challenges of youth in secondary schools.