Agents of Change: The Implementation and Evaluation of a Peer Education Programme on Sexuality in the Anglican Church of the Western Cape

This study was conducted in the Cape Town Diocese of the Anglican Church. Fikelela, an HIV/AIDS project of the Diocese, developed a 20-session peer education programme (Agents of Change) aimed at changing the risky sexual behaviour of youth. Workshops were also aimed at parents.

The aim of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness and functioning of the programme, to develop a best practice model and to make recommendations for the use of the programme in the wider church.

Outcome mapping was used to integrate an approach to the design, monitoring and evaluation of the programme. Changes in project partners, key project strategies and organisational practices were all monitored. Project partners were defined as peer educators, facilitators, young people, clergy and parents. Monitoring allowed an in-depth understanding of which aspects of the programme worked.
Evaluation was designed as a quasi-experimental study that compared non-randomly chosen intervention and control groups. 1352 participants took part at base-line, 176 returned matched questionnaires in the intervention groups and 92 in the control groups. Reported changes in attitudes, knowledge and sexual behaviour were compared between the two groups.