The 100-Day goal
At a national launch, stakeholders voted on six promising areas and chose school-based behaviour change as the most popular, on the reasoning that young people were at greatest risk and schools were where lifelong values form. The goal was to elicit measurable change in HIV prevention inside 100 days, starting small and expanding on what each phase taught.
The results
Phase I ran with 1,200 students in six secondary schools in zoba Maekel. Phase II expanded to 14,200 students across eleven secondary and ten junior schools, reaching into zoba Northern Red Sea. Phase III reached 19,000 students in fifteen secondary and sixteen junior schools, extending to zoba Anseba and Gash Barka.
Total reach came to around 40,000 students, teachers, supervisors, administrators and community members across four of Eritrea’s six zobas.
Among students aged 16 to 18, reported abstinence moved from 90% in Phase I toward 98% and then 99% across the phases. The report is candid that the short cycle made rigorous evaluation hard, so these are self-reported figures rather than verified behaviour.
Who did the work
A cascade structure inside the zoba Ministry of Education. A zoba education officer led as strategic leader, two coaches from the education office ran teacher training, school team leaders coordinated work teams, and peer leaders, one for every 20 students and elected by their peers, delivered the sessions. The Ministries of Health and Information, zoba assemblies, the HAMSET project, religious leaders and PTAs all played defined roles.
How they did it
The design put students in front of students. Teachers trained peer educators during the week, and peer educators ran the Friday sessions themselves, with teachers deliberately absent so young people would speak freely. Sessions used dramas, role-plays, debates and case studies rather than lectures, and implementers ranked the participatory activities as far more effective than pamphlets or art exhibitions.
The single most important decision was structural. When Phase I’s two coaches could not cover the expansion, the zoba education officer chose not to hire more coaches. Instead he made RRI a standard part of every school inspector’s job and folded monitoring into routine inspection. That turned RRI from a vertical programme dependent on special staff into a horizontal one built into the ministry’s daily work.
Extracurricular clubs pushed the message past the school gate, with drama and music clubs producing street theatre and World AIDS Day exhibitions.
What continues
The lessons were built into the life-skills curriculum now taught in all junior and secondary schools, which is the most complete form of institutionalisation on record across these international cases. The horizontal integration into the inspectorate means the method does not leave when a coach leaves.
