Gender
Improving female recruitment, participation, and retention among peer educators in the Geração BIZ Program in Mozambique
Initiatives to retain young women peer workers in a Mozambique HIV information project
Authors:
R Badiani; J Senderowitz; L Guirao; M| Mello;
Publisher:
Pathfinder International, 2006
This report from Pathfinder International outlines an intervention to boost the number of young women participating as peer workers in a youth work project in Mozambique. It describes how the new strategies for recruiting and supporting the women peer workers were developed and implemented, and analyses the effectiveness of the initiative.
The Geraçáo Biz (GBP) project is aimed at giving young people information and skills related to sexual health and HIV, along with access to clinical services. Peer education is an important part of the project but retaining young women as peer workers was a serious problem. GBP initiated a plan to understand the specific reasons why young women were leaving the project. From this, strategies were developed for recruiting and training young women, and for providing them with supervision and support. The new protocol resulted in a five-fold improvement in the retention rate of women peer workers. It also had a positive impact on the working of the project as a whole. These positive results included the development of a more systematic approach to recruitment, training and support; improvements in monitoring procedures and increased awareness of gender bias in the structure of the programme.
