McCormack School Forges Partnership to Combat HIV/AIDS in Kenya

By Margery O'Donnell

As an outgrowth of its existing USAID-funded project with Egerton University in Kenya, the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies is initiating a nationwide effort to help combat HIV/AIDS. The project at Egerton has been endorsed by Luci Kibaki, the first lady of Kenya, as a prototype for a countrywide initiative. As first discussed in meetings in October and November between Kibaki, her husband President Mwai Kibaki, and McCormack School's Dean Edmund Beard, Margery O'Donnell, Charles Ndungu, and Richard Njogu, the initiative will seek to build university-based community resource centers affiliated with each public university in Kenya.

The project will take a three-pronged approach: to construct multifunction community resource centers linked to each of Kenya's five public universities; to collaborate with the local communities to introduce HIV/AIDS public education, treatment, and advocacy programs in each region; and to develop additional multifaceted programs to combat the economic decline directly caused by the extraordinarily high rate of HIV/AIDS. Programs at the community resource centers will include classroom sessions, peer guidance and counseling, medical care giving and treatment through voluntary counseling and treatment, in-service teacher training, comprehensive programs for AIDS orphans, and efforts to integrate AIDS sufferers into viable economic and social roles.

On November 5, Kibaki laid the cornerstone at the first of the community resource centers at the Egerton campus. Even before the completion of the physical facility, thirty-two local young men and women were chosen to become the first trainers of other out-of-school youth from the area through an initial HIV/AIDS education program. Their task is, of course, daunting. There are an estimated 20,000 at-risk youth in the greater Nakuru region surrounding the Egerton campus alone, and HIV/AIDS infection in Kenya as a whole is estimated at upward of 20 percent.

Eventually, there will be approximately sixteen community resource centers or branches that will receive education and communications technology access from their university hubs. The third stage of the initiative will establish satellite centers to connect the public university campus hubs via Internet, satellite radio, telephone, and an on-site director from the university. While the centers will use the nation's university resources and distance learning links, they will be managed by a community council to ensure broad community involvement and sensitivity to community standards.

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