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.
More Powerful Than Preaching
The point, explains Nwokedi, is not to admonish kids for being sexually active, but to enlighten them. By acknowledging sex is healthy and normal and youth is a time of discovery and fun, the campaign teaches responsibility without preaching.
LoveLife was created to bridge the gap between South Africa’s deadly sex practices in a country that has a surprisingly high awareness about AIDS — 98 percent of South Africans are aware of the disease’s seriousness. Disconcerted by the disconnect, the Kaiser Family Foundation, based in Washington, D.C., commissioned a study in 1998 that examined 152 media-driven AIDS prevention programs around the world.
The research showed a mixed-media approach was most effective in targeting youth, says the foundation’s senior vice president, Dr. Michael Sinclair. Kaiser, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID and UNICEF, helps to fund the current campaign.
Another study that informed loveLife’s strategy found that despite its developing nation status, South African kids have similar preoccupations and aspirations as kids in England, France or the U.S. and, like them, respond to mass market advertising.
Media exposure is everywhere in South Africa. And that, Nwokedi believes, is key to the campaign’s success in having widespread recognition. “Young people, irrespective of their class and access to income, are exposed to the same images and messages,” she says.
But the TV shows are controversial. Mashapa Machaba, a 15 year-old S’camto anchor from rural Bushbuckridge, has a “don’t ask don’t tell policy” with his mother about his role on the TV show.
Before he auditioned for the job, his mother was so shocked by the subject matter on another loveLife program, she forbade him to watch, yet she allows him to do the show. Despite his on-camera ease, Machaba admits it’s tough talking openly to parents.
Many parents, like Machaba’s, believe their kids are not sexually active until about age 21, though statistics show South Africans now start having sex around 14, according to Kaiser’s Sinclair. This makes subjects like abortions, birth control and STDs hard to broach.
“In South Africa, young people and old people don’t talk about sex,” says Eric Mandla Sibeko, 21, a member of loveLife’s advisory board. The board, chaired by first lady Zanele Mbeki, is populated with youth leaders and adults to allow the two groups to address issues they normally avoid in mixed company.
Can it Work in the States? Word of loveLife has reached U.S. AIDS activists. Carole Henry, executive director of New York’s Mother’s Voices, thinks American children could benefit from a mass media safe sex and HIV-prevention campaign.
But parental denial is a problem in the United States as well. “We can’t seem to convince people that AIDS is an issue anymore,” Henry says. “The public incorrectly perceives that the threat is over.”
A stabilization in AIDS deaths — mostly due to today’s more effective drugs — has lulled Americans into a false sense of security, despite the fact that youth infection rates in the U.S. have more than doubled in the last four years, Henry says. With two under-25-year-olds infected with HIV every hour, Henry asks, “Is it going to have to ravage this country too before we do something about it?”
Kent Condera, a spokesman for Washington D.C.-based Advocacy for Youth, agrees American kids would respond well to peer-to-peer efforts like loveLife’s but says U.S. conservative politics presents a major obstacle. Nearly one quarter of U.S. sex education classes teach abstinence as the only form of HIV prevention, Henry points out.
Nwokedi admits she’d like to see more political leadership and support for loveLife and other prevention programs in South Africa, as well. Until that happens, the campaign will keep working on partnerships with corporate sponsors to reach the widest possible audience with their message of safer, smarter sex. “We are obsessed at loveLife with what we do,” says Nwokedi. “We are preoccupied.”