Assessment of curriculum response in 35 countries for the EFA monitoring report 2005: "The Quality Imperative".

The study primarily draws on data included in the IBE HIV/AIDS Curriculum Global Databank the IBE bibliographic catalogue and the Bank of World Data on Education. However it has been difficult for some countries to collect complete data (policy curriculum syllabi). We therefore limited our analysis to the most recent official documents reports and studies that were available to us at the moment of the study. In addition HIV/AIDS education is sometimes not yet formalized at policy and curriculum level. To somehow compensate the lack of official documents secondary sources such as country reports and regional review have been used in order to have a set of countries as large as possible. The type of sources used is mentioned throughout the analysis whenever relevant. The study does not claim to be comprehensive and exhaustive. The sample was not large enough for generalisation and fair representation of sampled countries and time allocated to the study was insufficient to collect more data in a systematic way. The necessity to use secondary sources as mentioned above clearly represents a limitation of this study. However data are sufficient to identify trends and "types" of responses and to make it possible based on existing research and evaluation on the effectiveness of curricular approaches to discuss likely consequences of HIV/AIDS curriculum on implemented programs in school and classrooms. (excerpt)