HIV/AIDS education reduces teenage pregnancies

However, it appears that there would not have been such a swelling number of teen pregnancies had the girls and the youth at large been imparted with enough knowledge about sex and effective use of condoms.

It is the culture of silence regarding sex issues especially at the household level exacerbated by elderly male sexual predators’ maneuvers on innocent girls that are to blame for the negative social tendency.

Given sexual taboo, most parents would not get themselves involved in discussing sex with their children, limiting themselves with lectures on abstinence.

Paradoxically indeed is that teens who are forbidden from having sex are the very ones who start doing it prematurely and in most cases with the knowledge of the very parents who had been painting a notoriously dreadful image on sex, making their warning useless for sexual irresponsible children growing up in an infested world of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

Therefore, the decline in the use of condoms is not a matter of coincidence; rather an alarming call to policy makers as it is a definite impediment to an anti-HIV/AIDS campaign especially among youths aged between 15 and 24 years.

Although the risk category has been only revealed in the past four years, the apathy in the use of condoms among the youth had been recorded earlier as depicted in scholarly publications by Katikiro, Njau, Mlunde and co-authors in 2012.

It is a situation that calls for heightened sex education with a focus on proper condom use both as a contraceptive and prevention from AIDS coupled with measures to ensure accessibility in terms of distribution and prices in both urban and rural areas.

But the use of condoms is also deterred by the patrimonial cultural principles typical of Tanzania with the backing of factors such as age, level of education and exposure to modernity, where women do not command the use of condoms during sexual intercourse. Worse still is when the female partner is too young to resist an anti-condom command by an older bed fellow who is far superior in sexual experience.

This increases teenage girls’ vulnerability to getting unwanted pregnancies and contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs) including HIV/AIDS.

As a result, most teen pregnancies and HIV transmission among schoolgirls are accidental from their being unconsciously lured into sex.

Thus, even the well-established contention that the 15-24 age group largely does not prefer using condom during sexual activity due to lack of sex education as Kapinga and Lugalla found out in their study conducted in 2003, the situation still begs for further probes in determining comparative reaction on the use of condoms between boys or girls.

Such questions like “who has sex with whom” and “who makes the final decision in whether to use condom”, are also worth the probes.

Some cultural and other misconceptions discouraging people especially the youth from using condoms also need to be properly dealt with. The “myths” worth fighting include the belief that condoms contain harmful worms as reported by Siegler and his colleagues in their study conducted in Tanzania in 2012, as well as condom being not an effective preventive tool.

While the situation can be generalized across the whole country, yet there is every reason to believe that a great variation exists in the people’s understanding of HIV between rural and urban areas and that this variation needs to be contextually addressed to fit in the local conditions of the given areas.

With little exposure to media and other forms of direct communication, rural residents do not receive enough and tailor-made messages about HIV/AIDS and the ways to protect oneself and protect others from contracting the infection in areas where sex is either sole or main recreational activity.

However, it would be not absolutely accurate drawing a conclusion that HIV awareness is higher in urban centres than in rural areas, for the hectic lifestyle in the former is likely to deny the residents enough time to get acquainted with HIV/AIDS and safe sex related materials.

Moreover, the urbanite youth are exposed to massive recreational options, thus vulnerable to reckless use of alcohol and illicit substance likely to drive them into engagement in unprotected sex.

Given this complex situation regarding the embedded danger of HIV transmission and teen pregnancy perhaps there is a need to involve community radio stations in the HIV/AIDS and reproductive health campaigns for a wider reach.

This could also be motivated with free distribution of condoms, especially in rural settings where the income is too low to afford the luxury.

This will help not only raise HIV/AIDS awareness and ease the access to condom thereby reduce the risk of contracting the deadly virus among the youth and the general public, but also empower girls of the risk group into raising their voice against sexual abuses.

*Francis Semwaza is a Dar es Salaam-based Development Communication Specialist. For comments: E-mail: frsemwaza@aol.com; Phone: +255 71 646 6 044.