Beijing Gender Health Education Institute
Beijing Gender Health Education Institute (GHE) held trainers’ training on AIDS intervention of MSM community in
The training was moderated by Guo Yaqi, Chief of GHE. Based on the experiences we’ve accumulated in the past few years, we found out the participatory approach is an active and effective way to arouse communities’ interests, encourage their participation and to enhance the role of local communities in knowledge dissemination and intervention for AIDS prevention.
Volunteers participating in this training had carried out some outreach and intervention activities in local MSM communities. And this time they were going to share their experiences and further the realization of challenges that they are confronting so as to strengthen the capacity building of AIDS education throughout communities.
Building an atmosphere where everyone is encouraged to join in, share, discuss and learn, the participatory approach enabled participators to analyze experiences and challenges of previous AIDS intervention and to probe into strategies and solutions targeting practical problems and demands, which amounted to a successful experience of interactive participation. On the principle of share and exchange of Participatory Training, we worked together to seek for ways to face the challenges.
On the first day of training, based on the needs of community volunteers for participatory training, we told them primary training composition, techniques, principles and methods of participatory training by means of discussion, sharing and games so that participators can understand the required philosophy and basic demands for a host of participatory intervention training. On the second day, divided into groups, participators were asked to design a participatory training for one target group that they chose by themselves. The design should have the structure of a participatory training, including training theme, preparations, coordination, schedules, etc and later, was performed within each group. During the process, group members brought forward their own suggestions and recommendations on the intervention theme and learned what was helpful to them. At the same time, two groups gave demonstrations on the participatory training of how to correctly use condoms. After that, participators came up with their own opinions on the problems of the simulation, revised the design with the help of what they’d learned the previous day and finally, summarized the principles and methods that should be paid attention to during actual practices.
Participators praised highly of the training. They said that former trainings were always simply explaining policies and rules and failed to probe into the actual needs of target population and therefore were boring and dull.
They had encountered many problems during intervention, such as how to protect their own safety, how to communicate with target population adequately so as to realize the aims of intervention, etc, which made them rather confused. In this training, the host’s experiences with MSM people answers to the actual problems of community volunteers. In an open and equal atmosphere, everyone put timidity and shyness aside and engaged themselves actively in discussions. Thus, they not only talked about how to solve the actual problems, but also learned how to hold a participatory training in their own communities. Participators said that they will hold related trainings in local areas to convey more information on safe skills and ways of sex for the sake of AIDS intervention.
Mr. Guo Yaqi also commented, “I’ve been working many years on AIDS prevention of MSM community and can understand target groups well. So from my point of view, participatory training is a very useful way of intervention in this area, especially by training local human resources, who can go deep into local communities and transmit related knowledge, experiences and methods. This is undoubtedly the optimum approach to maintain the influences of intervention activities. However, during the training, I found out that some participators wrongly understand or know nothing about reasons and ways of AIDS transmission among the homosexual population. Therefore, we need to hold more training activities in this area in the future; this is also one of the core works of GHE.”