Lack of a comprehensive sex education policy in schools has been blamed for high HIV/Aids prevalence rate among adolescents aged between 15-19 years in the country.
UNICEF HIV/Aids Program Officer Ruth Onsando claimed that students lack adequate information on Aids scourge, as teachers do not exhaustively teach the topic due to lack of clear guidelines on what should be taught.
“There is lack of information in this age group because teachers just touch on the topic of HIV. They do not go deep enough to empower the adolescents with sufficient information,” she said.
Onsando who was addressing a media workshop in Nyamira Town Monday morning noted that most teachers handling the subject were also ill informed about the topic and could therefore not effectively deliver the message to the students.
The officer recommended that HIV sensitisation programmes undertaken in health facilities be extended to schools with contextualised information to help curb the disease's prevalence among students.
She said UNICEF is looking forward to partner with Nyamira and Kisii counties to create a website where specific data for the youth could be uploaded.
She said the data would help the counties in planning for adolescents’ reproductive health, besides their education and social protection.