Sex Ed Vs. HIV in South Africa
N E W Y O R K, Dec. 1, 2000 -- Teaching South Africans to talk about sex is a 28-hour-a-day job, jokes Joel Makitla, a young AIDS activist, who manages the loveLife Y-Center in Orange Farm.
Makitla, 28, spends his days speaking to teenagers about gender and sexuality issues and reaching out to parents, teachers and health workers in the semi-urban squatter community outside Johannesburg. Promoting discussion and more youth-friendly health services, he hopes, will help South Africa’s kids reach adulthood.
Y-Center is an arm of loveLife, a foundation-sponsored sex education and activism campaign that uses television, advertising and the Web to get youth talking about historically taboo topics. Launched in September 1999, LoveLife’s goal is to reduce the rate of HIV-infection — while fighting other sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy and violence against women — by 50 percent in five years.
In the world’s most HIV-infected nation, the campaign faces a lot of challenges.
A Dying Generation
According to United Nations AIDS group, UNAIDS, 20 percent of South Africans are infected with HIV, with an average of 1,700 new cases daily. At the current rate, the group projects, 3.5 million of them will be dead in the next five to 10 years.
To make matters worse, HIV-infection rates among 15-to-19-year-olds are surging, up by 65 percent in 1998 alone. That means one out of two South African teenagers may not live to see their 30th birthday. “We have this saying back home,” says loveLife media director Judi Nwokedi, in New York for today’s World AIDS Day Conference at the U.N. “Young, talented and dead.”
In addition to the field work at clinics, the campaign produces a magazine and Web site, billboards and a series of TV programs to try to convince kids communicating about sex is smart — and cool. Cameras in hand, young people on the talk-show S’camto go to cities and rural townships to converse with peers about safe sex, pregnancy, masturbation and sexuality.
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