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The Minister of Education, Professor Kader Asmal, will convene a national conference at the end of May 2002 to consider how HIV/AIDS will influence education quality and performance up to 2010. The conference will also look at how the sector can respond collectively to the challenges the pandemic poses to our education and training programmes.

Participants will be invited from the wide spectrum of those who are concerned and knowledgeable about HIV/AIDS, and have been working on containing its awesome influence on educators, learners, their families, and on the quality of the system of education itself. Young people, youth organisations, people who are living with AIDS, government social service officials, traditional, community leaders, non-governmental organisations, faith-based and international organisations will be represented, along with educators in schools and universities.

The conference will consider what partners in the education community are already doing, and what more needs to be done, given the growing incidence of HIV and the fact that we are all, in one way or another, affected by HIV/AIDS.

The conference will concentrate on three themes which underlie the Department of Education's strategic plan Tirisano: Call to Action. The first concern is to improve the education sector's capacity to contain the further spread of HIV/AIDS, the second imperative is the need for educators, in partnership with communities and social service workers, to establish networks of care and support for learners and educators affected by HIV/AIDS. The third is to limit the impact of the pandemic on education quality and provision.

Addressing these concerns will require commitment from all partners in the education community to work as a coalition in responding to the challenges of HIV/AIDS. This conference will set priorities for further action and elaborate strategic principles for taking action collectively. Identifying better ways of working together in order to make a comprehensive response to the pandemic within the sector will be a principal task for the conference.

The conference will build on the recommendations of the preceding conferences on sexuality (August 2001), teacher development (September 2001), as well as the experience of education partners to define future priorities, potential for collective action within a coalition against HIV/AIDS, and procedures for allocating available resources to those who can best use them.

Contact: Kgobati Magome at (012) 312 5034

Issued by: Department of Education, 2 April 2002