Promoting HIV Awareness among Egypt's Youth

Wesam Hassan - Egypt

Nov. 30, 2007—When she was 17 and in her final year of high school, Wesam Hassan was touched by a movie about a person living with HIV. Since then, she has been working to increase awareness of the disease in Egypt, a conservative country where sexual behavior is not a matter for public discourse and where women aren’t usually on the front lines of public policy.

“Only six percent of women in Egypt have comprehensive information about HIV. It’s taboo to talk about this stuff,” Wesam says. “Egypt has a good opportunity to curb the HIV virus only by increasing awareness.”

With the right kind of action, she says, Egypt could dodge the epidemic that has engulfed much of sub-Saharan Africa.

Wesam began her work as a teenager, with school broadcasts that explained how HIV was transmitted. Then she went to medical school, where she made an overt statement, the kind that is unusual in Egypt, by pinning a red ribbon to her clothing. “My colleagues said this is the symbol of HIV-positive people – not the people who support them,” Wesam says. “So I went to the Internet and started a search. I found that it was a symbol of supporting HIV-positive people.”

That would be the first, but not nearly the last, misperception that Wesam would battle in the coming years. Now 23 and in her fifth year of medical school, she has dedicated herself to doing whatever she can to prevent AIDS among Egypt’s youth and to advocating on behalf of women. Following that initial misunderstanding, Wesam decided to conduct a workshop, attended by 50 people, to raise awareness at Mansoura University. During their first presentation, she and some of her friends in the Mansoura Scientific Student Association not surprisingly focused on misconceptions, misinformation, stigmas and discrimination.

“We felt like we were really doing something, making a difference,” she says. They repeated the workshop a few months later, and then began to turn their attention to youths. Her goal was to establish high school clubs that would reduce the spread of HIV by teaching young people how it is transmitted.

Wesam attended a training program sponsored by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), sought funding from the UN Development Fund for Women, and established anti-AIDS clubs in five high schools in the city of Mansoura. She personally headed the program at a girls’ high school. “It was one of the turning points in my life,” she says now. “I got really connected to the girls at 14 years old and also the teachers and the community. We had a lot of challenges.”

Wesam soldiered on, working in the school for two-and-a-half years. Meanwhile, she became involved with UNFPA’s Youth Peer Education Network, or Y-PEER, a cutting edge program that provides training and support to more than 2,000 peer educators who are working to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases in 39 countries. Through a Web site and other media, including MTV, the network offers its trainers advocacy materials, lesson plans, teleconferences, courses and discussion forums. It helps them connect with each other within their countries and among them.

In order to desensitize discussions about HIV/AIDS in a country in which open dialogue about sex is frowned upon, Wesam and her colleagues have turned to the theater and a radio station that targets young people. The infection rate in Egypt appears to be minuscule—only 5,300 people were living with HIV/AIDS in 2006, less than one-tenth of a percent of the population, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation—but Wesam says she considers the number suspect.

“People are afraid to get tested” because of social and religious constraints, she says. In her six years of working to prevent HIV/AIDS, Wesam has only met one Egyptian who acknowledged having contracted the disease.

At the summer 2007 Advancing Women’s Leadership and Advocacy for AIDS Action workshop, she met many women living with HIV, and Wesam came away with a profound appreciation for them and their work. All the women were advocates like her, but AIDS had touched them in a much more personal way.

“They are amazing,” she says. “They are inspiring me. They are teaching me strength. They taught me that all communities are like each other. We are all the same. But culture can be a barrier, and tradition.”

“I hope, when I go home, that I will meet HIV-positive people and see them empowered like these women.”

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Wesam participated in Advancing Women’s Leadership and Advocacy for AIDS Action, an initiative to equip and empower a cadre of women from around the world with the knowledge and skills to strengthen and lead the global response to AIDS.

You can read more about the initiative here.

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