Thursday 27 June 2013

PROMOTING EDUCATION IN REMOTE AREAS



Education is the most powerful weapon that can help to transform the world and this notion really needs to be pressed forward. Education is well thought-out as a human right for all and it requires to be pursued by individuals.

 However, there are some youths who, either willingly deny themselves or are unwillingly denied the exercise of this right. The reasons for this are very diverse but the major ones include laziness and a lack of interest on the part of individuals. On the other hand, policy makers and appropriate institutions are not doing enough in ensuring that learning institutions should be within reach of the youths. Furthermore, they also need to ensure that necessary teaching and learning materials are available in the academic institutions.

It has been noted that school dropout rate in Malawi and other developing countries is very high in remote areas. This takes us back to the aforementioned policy makers and stakeholders who really need to come up with comprehensive strategies in order to address the existing barriers. The fact that there are more schools in urban and semi-urban areas than in rural areas needs not to be overemphasized. Thus, schools are very far away from the youths and young children cannot manage to cover the long distances every five days in a week. When they realize that they cannot manage, they just drop out a few months or years after enrolling.

Besides this task, they (policy makers and stakeholders) also need to constitute deliberate policies to ensure that the youths in remote areas are going to school. For instance, as some quarters have suggested that primary education should be made compulsory, such an intervention would help to call back those that dropped out of school because of laziness or due to other trivial reasons.

Let us unite and promote education in remote areas for individual development of youths in remote areas as well as for the development of third world countries as a whole.























Monday 17 June 2013

Reducing HIV and AIDS in Adolescents

Adolescents are critical to efforts to end the AIDS pandemic. Few national AIDS strategies explicitly program for children in their second decade of life. Adolescents (aged 10–19 years) are therefore largely invisible in global, regional, and country HIV and AIDS reports making it difficult to assess progress in this population. We have unprecedented knowledge to guide investment towards greater impact on HIV prevention, treatment, and care in adolescents, but it has not been applied to reach those most vulnerable and optimize efficiency and scale. The cost of this is increasing AIDS-related deaths and largely unchanged levels of new HIV infections in adolescents. An AIDS-free generation will remain out of reach if the global community does not prioritize adolescents. National AIDS responses must be accountable to adolescents, invest in strengthening and monitoring protective and supportive laws and policies and access for adolescents to high impact HIV interventions.