Evidence-based Youth Peer Education: Guidelines for Action

Youth peer-education is widely-used in community-based programs to promote sexual and reproductive health, including HIV prevention, among young people (ages 10-24). However, the quality and impact of youth peer education (YPE) programs vary tremendously, and significant challenges, such as high turnover and difficulty achieving clear behavioral outcomes, plague many programs. Yet research shows that well-designed and well-implemented YPE programs can improve young people's health-related knowledge, attitudes, access to health services, and to some extent, their behavior. For peer education programs to achieve these results more consistently, practitioners and policy makers require more information on evidence-based practices and guidance on how to apply these practices to current YPE programming and policies. The Evidence-based Youth Peer Education: Guidelines for Action, developed in 2009 by Family Health International (FHI) with content support from the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare of Tanzania, UNFPA, Y-PEER, and experts around the world, offers such information and guidance. The guidelines provide practical information on the planning, implementation, management, and evaluation of YPE programs and make specific reference to available evidence and real world examples from YPE programs globally. When applied to a new or existing YPE program, the Guidelines for Action have the potential to improve the quality of that program and to signify to donors and others that the program is formed around evidence-based practices. The guidelines will be disseminated widely in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and are relevant to policy-makers, program managers, supervisors, trainers, and the peer educators themselves.