Beacon of hope: Evaluation of the Kenya Girl Guides Association HIV/AIDS program for school children

This Horizons report presents findings from an evaluation of the Kenya Girl Guides Participatory Peer Education Program for HIV and AIDS Prevention. The objective of the program was to train Girl Guide patrol leaders as peer educators, who in turn would communicate key information and concepts about such topics as HIV prevention, relationships, and self-esteem to other Girl Guides, and ultimately to their school peers. The results demonstrate that peer education conducted by Girl Guides is a feasible strategy for imparting HIV and AIDS education to school-going youth; however, such a program would need to be branded, strengthened, and appropriately resourced to attain positive results that extend beyond the Girl Guides to include their peers. The results also demonstrate that school girls in this study are operating in an environment where their male counterparts are more than seven times as likely to be sexually experienced, and may be exerting considerable pressure to have sex even on the strongest of girls. HIV risk-reduction programs directed at school girls may be more successful if they also address the risk behavior of school boys

Do floods affect food security? A before-and-after comparative study of flood-affected households’ food security status in South-Eastern Nigeria

A comparative study of pre- and post-flood households’ food security statuses in South-Eastern Nigeria was performed to answer the question “Do floods affect food security?” Data were generated via a survey of 400 households in eight communities using stratified and random sampling methods. Households’ food security statuses were assessed using the Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM) and computed using a Rasch analysis, where households were divided into four categories, namely: food secure, food insecure without hunger, moderately food insecure with hunger and severely food insecure with hunger. The results show that flooding affects food security negatively by increasing the number of food insecure households to 92.8%, and the regression coefficient of −0.798 indicates a very strong negative effect of flooding on household food security. An odds ratio of 2.221 implies that households that have experienced flooding are 2.221 times more probable to be food insecure than households that have not. The implication of the findings is that flooding is capable of turning communities into food insecurity hotspots that would need long-term assistance to cope, and flooding is capable of hampering the achievement of Goal 2 of the SDGs

Politically allocated land rights and the geography of electoral violence: the case of Kenya in the 1990s

Large literatures in political theory and political economy argue that private property regimes help support liberal electoral regimes by constraining majoritarian politics, lowering the stakes of elections, and protecting “fundamental” or minority rights. This article probes implications of this argument for elections in sub-Saharan Africa, a mostly rural continent where only about 2% to 10% of all rural property (by country) is held under private title. Do Africa’s rural property regimes shape electoral dynamics and, if so, which ones, and how? This article examines the case of Kenya, focusing on 1991-1992 electoral dynamics in rural zones in which the state itself has exercised direct prerogative over land allocation. We show that in these zones, politicians manipulated land rights to mobilize supporters and punish opponents. They did so in ways that contributed directly to widespread land-related violence at election time. References to other African cases help generalize and set scope conditions on the argument