This initiative involves an accelerated HIV/AIDS prevention response targeting men in prisons and in institutions of tertiary education in the Western Cape.
What is involved?
Sonke Gender Justice is working with the MAP network and the Department of Health to accelerate HIV/AIDS prevention programmes in the Western Cape.
Sonke Gender Justice Project will support partner organisations to implement Men as Partners projects that lead to a reduction in new HIV infections and contribute to men playing a more active role in their communities to reduce the spread and impact of HIV and AIDS.
Why Prisons?
Sonke Gender Justice will be targetting staff and inmates at the participating Correctional Facilities in the Western Cape. Family members of inmates and staff and the broader communities will indirectly benefit from the prevention interventions.
Sonke Gender Justice will
Identify the social networks amongst inmates and popular opinion leaders to take on risk-reduction advocacy roles.
Provide a series of short trainings to DCS staff on HIV prevention, gender and health-focusing both on DCS staff and inmates.
3. Give information and encourage responsible behaviour amongst inmates and staff in relation to HIV/AIDS, gender, sexual and reproductive health issues.
4. Train cadres of opinion leaders to disseminate risk reduction endorsement messages within their own prison based social networks.
5. Initiate and support awareness raising activities in the correctional facilities.
6. Set up a monitoring and evaluation framework to assess project progress.
What is Sonke Gender Justice doing?
Sonke Gender Justice is:
- Offering training and technical assistance to partner organisations.
- Conducting research to help develop appropriate strategies that lead to men taking action at the community level to become more involved in HIV prevention, care and support.
- Building capacity in existing community based organisations in the Western Cape to strengthen their work and to promote effective collaboration.
- Working with established networks and popular opinion leaders to engage and mobilise existing networks of men to carry out HIV prevention education and activities.
- Developing Information, Education and Communication (IEC) and Behaviour Change Communications (BCC) materials that can be used to engage men in HIV prevention strategies. These will include murals, picture codes, and digital stories profiling the life stories of men who are active in efforts to address HIV and AIDS.
- Educating and mobilising communities, through MAP workshops and other activities.
- Encouraging and training partner organisations to use arts for HIV prevention, including “ambush theatre”.
- Using advocacy and activism to draw attention to the relationship between HIV/AIDS and gender based violence and to demand effective responses to domestic and sexual violence.
- Strengthening peer networks and the development of networks with influential groups and individuals, through participation in regular partners meetings.
