Susan Kiragu

‘Deceptive’ cultural practices that sabotage HIV/AIDS education in Tanzania and Kenya

In spite of numerous HIV/AIDS‐prevention education efforts, the HIV infection rates in sub‐Saharan Africa remain high. Exploring and understanding the reasons behind these infection rates is imperative in a bid to offer life skills and moral education that address the root causes of the pandemic. In a recent study concerning effective HIV/AIDS‐prevention education, conducted in Tanzania and Kenya among teacher trainees and their tutors, the notion of mila potofu (defined by educators as ‘deceptive’ cultural practices) emerged as a key reason for educators’ difficulties in teaching HIV/AIDS prevention education in schools and for high HIV infection rates. Since these cultural practices cause harm, and in many cases lead to death, they are of moral concern. This paper outlines some of these cultural practices identified by educators, including ‘wife inheritance’, ‘sexual cleansing’ and the taboo against certain foods, and discusses how these practices contribute towards HIV/AIDS vulnerability. It then offers recommendations for classroom‐based life skills and moral education following Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development in understanding how ‘assimilation’, ‘accommodation’ and ‘adaptation’ can help people discard mila potofu in a culturally sensitive manner.

How we used moral imagination to address ethical and methodological complexities while conducting research with girls in school against the odds in Kenya

This article presents a reflection on the ethical and methodological complexities experienced when conducting research in schools in Kajiado district, Kenya, which sought to understand why some girls were in school in spite of the socio-cultural and economic problems they faced. Three complexities are discussed (positionality and power between the teachers, girls and researchers, confidentiality of girls’ information, and researchers personal involvement and advocacy). A framework of moral imagination is used to deconstruct the process of moral and ethical decision-making that took place in response to these complexities. This involves the researcher taking a position that strives, not simply to ‘do no harm’, but to go one step further and to ‘do good’, within a context of social justice. The article is drawn from an ongoing longitudinal study on girls ‘against the odds’. In the pilot study reported here, four primary schools were involved and interviews were carried out with 24 girls, alongside observations of the surrounding environment and informal conversations with eight teachers.

Exploring Sexuality Education and the Burdened Teacher: A Participatory Approach in a Rural Primary School in Kenya

Abstract Twenty-five years since the onset of HIV/AIDS, young people aged 15–24 now make up half of new HIV infections. This paper advocates for comprehensive sexuality education as an effective panacea to reverse this, with teachers stepping up and embracing their role as sexuality educators. The exploration of this challenge is informed by a small-scale participatory study of teacher responses in a rural primary school in Nakuru district, Kenya. Dialogue was held with 18 teachers (11 females, seven males) on the challenges they faced in teaching sexuality education and teachers emerged as disorientated and embarrassed in conversations about sexuality issues with the pupils. Because sexuality education lacks a curriculum, teachers have found it challenging to integrate it into regular subjects; they also observed that parents seem resistant to addressing this at home, and thus this task falls to them. In the study, a process of self-awareness of the need for them to step up and teach sexuality education emerges among the participants. A key finding is that participatory and dialectical interventions that can prepare teachers and develop their confidence in teaching sexuality education are required.

Creating ‘participatory spaces’: involving children in planning sex education lessons in Kenya, Ghana and Swaziland

Sexuality education in African contexts is riddled with socio-cultural complexity, tension and taboo. Such tensions are compounded when the focus of intervention is primary school children who are presumed ‘innocent’. However, sub-Saharan Africa remains the region of the world most severely impacted upon by the human immunodeficiency virus and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, thus heightening the need to talk to children about sex and sexuality. This paper explores the role of consulting pupils, participation and dialogue as methodological innovations that have the potential to enable new ways of thinking about sex and sexuality and the transcendence of ‘dead end debates’ about what should and should not be taught. The paper is based on data from an action research project in Kenya, Ghana and Swaziland. The data show that the desire to create a space characterised by consultation, listening and dialogue in which adults and children could participate ‘as if’ they were social equals was inevitably not straightforward or ever fully realised. Nevertheless, pupils were able to make their voices heard at many points in these spaces and powerful moments of dialogue did exist with some of the adults undergoing significant changes of opinion throughout the process.

Conceptualising children as sexual beings: pre-colonial sexuality education among the Gĩkũyũ of Kenya

Based on oral history accounts elicited from 25 Gĩkũyũ elders in Kenya, this paper describes a non-penetrative sexual practice, ngweko, permitted for the sake of pleasure and sexual release among circumcised and unmarried young people in the Gĩkũyũ community. Lessons that can be learned from the pre-colonial Gĩkũyũ sexuality culture are identified, and possible implications for contemporary sexuality education explored.