Maasai Girls. Credit: Christina Lauterbach

Empuaan’s community outreach aims to present HIV awareness information and promote HIV-related discussion, using traditional Maasai venues, settings and systems for information sharing and debate.

For a community to be able to protect itself from sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, accurate information and appropriate education are important prerequisites. However, it is generally recognised that knowledge alone rarely results in the desired behaviour change. In order to avoid disease individuals must:

• Perceive that their sexual behaviour places them at risk for STI and HIV infection – influenced by perceived susceptibility, knowledge of transmission and perceived norms regarding sexual behaviour
• Make a commitment to behavioural change – influenced by the perceived costs and benefits of high-risk versus low-risk behaviour
• Take action to change – influenced by social support and acquisition of skills and resources needed to make the changes

Empuaan aims to provide not only factual information, but also to facilitate successful behaviour change. Education for risk reduction is more effective where people are offered choice and themselves take ownership of behaviour change decisions. Empuaan therefore uses a problem-posing approach to education (as opposed to simply giving individuals facts and instructions about what they should do). The aim is to provide an active, dialogical education programme in which participants are actively included in formulating critical analysis and generating scenarios for alternative ways of being.

While the Maasai system of social organisation generates patterns of sexual networking that facilitate the sexual transmission of STIs, including HIV, it also provides an excellent environment for group discussion and critical analysis that can lead to effective risk reduction behaviour. The Maasai have no centralised form of political authority and there are no traditional chiefs, headmen, or other functionaries with traditional political power. Leadership is vested in the formal positions of age-set spokesmen and is less concerned with the exercise of power than with the exertion of influence, since emphasis is placed on conformity and on the achievement of consensus in debate over important issues.

The Maasai egalitarian ideal emphasises the importance of group discussion and group decision-making over important issues. The high value Maasai place on debate and consensus provides an excellent environment for effective, culturally-relevant health promotion. 

Specifically organised community meetings provide the forum for group discussion and decision-making concerning STIs, STI health-seeking behaviour, HIV/AIDS, risk reduction and condom use. Discussion are aimed at increasing the population’s awareness of, and ability to address, their own risk of STIs and HIV. During counselling sessions attention is paid to the three domains of learning: cognitive (the knowledge aspect of the education process), affective (emotions, attitudes and feelings), and psychomotor (skills building).

See also Educational Theatre for HIV Prevention and Youth Literature Project.