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| HIV/AIDS rate very high in PNG | |
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By ZARA KANU PAPUA New Guinea has a very high rate of people living with HIV/AIDS, ranking fourth in the Oceania region. This should allow the Education department to give this issue prominence in its curriculum, director for Enga University of Papua New Guinea centre Raphael Tombe has said when presenting his abstract at the UPNG during the PNG Association for Distance Education biennial conference. The abstract entitled Zero effectiveness on HIV/AIDS awareness and the need for a separate HIV/AIDS curriculum in Papua New Guinea showed, through research, that there was a limited subject content coverage regarding HIV/AIDS in the formal educational curriculum in practice and the regular face to face educational approach benefits only a small portion of the youth population. Mr Tombe said the current curriculum does not address this issue and it is only being taught in Grade 10. “But it is surprising to find that the majority of those infected with the virus are students and people in the workforce,” he added. From his research it was found that a vast majority of people were still confused and cannot differentiate between HIV and AIDS. Mr Tombe said that although the millennium development goal which is to minimise the spread of the virus by 2015 and the national medium term development strategy have chartered HIV/AIDS as a critical development issue, it is not reflected in the formal education curriculum when it comes for implementation . This issue has become a concern for the Open College of the University of Papua New Guinea, which is the flagship-provider of distance education in the country reaching out to more than 12,000 distance education students. The open college, in realising an urgent need for a curriculum on HIV/AIDS, is considering development of a curriculum that will reach out to both distant learners as well as those in the formal system by adopting an open and distance learning methodology to address the need. |
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