Every week 6,200 adolescent girls and young women become infected with HIV. Sexual and reproductive health and rights programmes for your young women need to be expanded and scaled up in order to reach more high-incidence locations and maximise impact. This campaign gives adolescent girls and young women chance that they should be supported as equal partners for development. A particularly complicated cycle of transmission involves men ages 25-34 infecting adolescent girls/young women ages 15-24, who then go on to infect their longer-term male partners ages 24-35, and the cycle continues. Prevalence among 20-24-year-old women is three times higher than in men their age. Promoting prevention through behavior and voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) and getting those men who are already living with HIV on treatment and virally suppressed so they can’t pass the virus to their partners are critical interventions. Community outreach is one way to reach AGYW and their male partners, especially those out-of-school who have a substantially higher HIV risk and men older than 25 years, by bringing information and services to where they are.

The primary objective of this campaign is to bring about positive change in adolescent girls and further their development of pro-social actions that benefit another person without an expected reward for self. This campaign focuses on what individuals personally can do to change behaviour and thereby avoid or reduce the risk of infection. A Child, who is able to reason about implications of certain behaviour, shows higher levels of pro-social behaviour. This is a result of constant reinforcement of a value system and clearly defined boundaries from a very young age. Train a child in the way he should go.

Adolescent girls and young women require special attention in all epidemic scenarios, due to their reduced access to information, resources, lower power and autonomy — as compared to their male counterparts — in nearly all settings. Education of Hope Africa prioritizes the needs of young people who are part of most at-risk populations, or residing in high prevalence settings.