Stepping Stones: a training package on HIV/AIDS, communication and relationship Skills

The manual provides details of a training workshop which could be run in a community. It describes the carefully studied sequence of ideas which community members can be encouraged to consider and discuss. Issues of perceptions, prejudice, love, sexuality, condoms, and HIV/AIDS are treated in a series of different sessions encouraging people's self-assertion and empowerement. Appropriate exercises and session timetables are also provided for the trainer. It is important to follow the preordained sequencing of exercise and ideas in order to take people through a gradual training process leading to greater knowledge and consciousness related to AIDS. The accompanying video provides illustrative material, from Uganda, showing members of a rural community discussing and re-enacting their own problems and developing their own solutions. Again, the video is divided into fifteen brief clips, provoking discussion in a participatory way to accompany the sessions described in the manual. Both the manual and the video have been designed specifically for users in Sub-Saharan Africa. A final warning: this training package is for use only where there is an on-going AIDS prevention and support programme, or a programme where AIDS is included.