NATIONAL YOUTH NETWORK ON HIV/AIDS
(NYNETHA)
ANAMBRA STATE CHAPTER
18 Ihitenansa Iyiowa Odekpe, Ogbaru LGA.
joemetals@yahoo.com 08034629949

STATEMENT ON WORLD AIDS DAY presented by the state coordinator, Comrade Chidi Ezegwu on December 1, 2006

Today is World AIDS Day - an occasion to commemorate the challenges posed by a pandemic that has had a devastating effect on mankind, in particular the youth.

More than half of the 60 million people who have been infected by HIV in the past 20 years have been young people aged between 15 and 24. In Nigeria young people between the ages of 15 and 29 are most vulnerable to this global pandemic. Twelve million young people are today living with HIV/AIDS, and 6,000 more infected every day: that is 250 infected every hour.

NYNETHA is a network of youth serving organisations in the field of HIV/AIDS, Sexual reproductive health and right issues. The network was established in 2004 with the assistance from the National Action Committee on AIDS (NACA) Ministry of Inter-governmental Affiars and Youth Development (MIGA-SD) and UN system in Nigeria. Anamba State chapter now has 46 member organisations networking together in the fight agaisat the pandemic in the state.

On this revered occasion, we would like to call upon all stakeholders, partners, governments and youth organisations to reflect on the recommendations made by the National Youth network on HIV/AIDS in Nigeria (NYNETHA) this day 1st December 2006

Youth and Policy

1. NYNETHA should be involved throughout the development process of any policy affecting youth and HIV/AIDS

2. Create an enabling environment for appropriate laws and polices by promoting policy dialogue for HIV/STI prevention and care at all levels to mobilize resources, ensure ownership and sustainability, and promote a rights-based approach

3. Foster the participation of all youth in HIV/AIDS policy development and programmes, including those with disabilities and people living with HIV/AIDS

4. Work closely with a single-coordinating NYNETHA and promote the decentralization of AIDS councils down to the local levels


Gender Dimensions

5. Mainstream gender dimensions into all aspects of STIs and HIV/AIDS interventions, including: educational attainment, elimination of gender-based violence/coercive sex, empowerment of women and girls to exercise rights, empowerment to negotiate condom use, elimination of harmful traditional practices and all forms of stigma and discrimination, redefinition of stereotypical gender roles, and increased positive involvement of men and boys

Prevention

6. Prevention must remain the key strategy in combating HIV/AIDS. Preventive-education consisting of raising awareness, developing knowledge and skills to reduce infections, access to care, support and counseling, and empowering decision-makers from state to community levels

Multi-Sectoral Approach

7. Employ a multi-sectoral program approach as the roots of the HIV/AIDS epidemic are complex, reflecting cultural, economic, legal, and gender-based challenges

8. Policies and programmes must address the underbelly of the HIV/AIDS epidemic by simultaneously focusing on gender, culture, poverty, and human rights to eliminate the vulnerability barriers surrounding HIV/AIDS

9. Respect cultural dimensions of HIV/AIDS while addressing harmful practices, and supporting adherence to the internationally endorsed principles of human rights

Community Mobilization

10. Results-based programmes targeting behaviour change should be founded on evidence-based socio-cultural research of culture, attitudes, and practices of all beneficiaries reflecting young people, and the community leaders who are the custodians of cultural norms and practices

11. Engage community and its traditional, religious and cultural leaders in programme design to encourage ownership, acceptability, utilization and sustainability

12. Family-unit must be targeted in HIV prevention programming as the first agent of socialization among young people

Sexual and Reproductive Health

13. Capacity development for professionals, service providers, teachers and other members of the school community, as well as peer educators and parents to address youth sexual and reproductive health needs

14. Utilize Sexual and Reproductive Health programmes as entry point for HIV/AIDS initiatives (i.e. maternal health, family planning, and STI management) to provide HIV prevention counseling, HIV voluntary counseling and testing, STI management, and antiretroviral drugs

15. Development of skills for prevention and management of STIs and counseling

16. Advocacy for voluntary counselling and testing for HIV (VCT) care and support;

M&E

17. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) plan must be integrated into any NYNETHA-lead programme on HIV/AIDS, and NYNETHA should strive to provide monitoring assistance to government-driven HIV/AIDS programmes among young people

Knowledge Sharing

18. Adopt culture of information- sharing and cross-fertilization of good practices between countries at all levels

19. Networking NYNETHA at state, local and community levels should be systemized

20. Networking with Non-governmental organisations, faith based organisaations, community associations and institutions playing critical roles in defining social norms

21. Take initiative to train ourselves as youth leaders to understand and enhance the role of young people in moving youth platform forward

22. Promote and package awareness and advocacy initiatives that build on the positive socio-cultural values and norms in communities to address the adolescent/youth SRH needs and concerns

Resources

23. Investment of modest resources to combat HIV/AIDS now will prevent high economic and human costs in the future

24. Programme design must ensure that maximum resources allocated through NYNETHA and networking youth organisations are reaching intended beneficiaries

25. Advocate for government support towards research and development of locally produced ARV's, and lobby for access to free and/or subsidized ARVs

26. Create and maintain partnership with governments, Donors, UN agencies, business groups and other institutions to mobilize resources, materials and technical assistance for HIV/AIDS programming

Actions for NYNETHA in Anambra state

27. Utilize the central available fund to expand strategic alliances with governments, NGOs, bi/multi-lateral donors, private sector, media, FBOs, CBOs, YPLWAS

28. NYNETHA should better reflect gender equity in its programs

29. NYNETHA should define and practice a consistent classification of "youth" to ensure suitable participation, and that program and policy is addressing intended beneficiaries.

Let us rise to meet the HIV/AIDS Challenge!

Thanks

This paper was presented at the conference of the Nigerian Political Science Association (NPSA) South East chapter by Chidi Ezegwu

Theme: Politics and Governance in the South East Today

Held at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, Nigeria

Date: 22nd – 25th November 2006


INTRODUCTION
To many, the history of electoral system in Nigeria could be seen as the history of electoral fraud. Every party in power has always tried to ensure victory for itself. Nigerian political parties go into elections not to win peoples mandate but to use all their available means to rig elections in their favour. The party in power had always been at advantage to out-rig others, simply because, it advantageously controls the instruments and virtually all the wherewithal to do so. International observers during the last 2003 election noted as Abati (2005) wrote, “Nigerian politicians used a combination of about 55 methods of rigging”

The rate of the problems associated with manual voting and voting system in the world has led to re-consideration and search for a better and cost effective voting system by various countries of the world. Presently, the whole world is talking about transparency and democratisation, and at the other hand the globalised world is driven by technology. Nigeria has as well taken a bold step to join other countries with the recommendation of the 2005 National Political Reform Conference, and eventual adoption of the system by the Independent Electoral Commission in July 2005. In their best judgment, the system is the remedy for virtually all electoral fraud in the country. This step, as wise as it may appear, calls for re-examination and critical analysis of its overriding problems and prospects. The sincerity of their choice and decision to apply the system as solution to electoral malpractices in Nigeria is another issue of concern as oppositions to the adoption of the system allay. The electronic voting system, however good, like other human efforts at solving contemporary problems, has its own flaws, which will also be complicated by the Nigerian setting that is bedraggled with stagnation, corruption and backwardness.

This work therefore explores the problems and prospects of adopting electronic voting system in Nigeria by the Independent National Electoral Commission, which has received the blessing of the present leadership of the country. It focuses on the practicability of the system in Nigeria, with reference to the contemporary nature, socio-political and economic setting, the structure and history of the country.
TYPES AND FUNCTIONS OF ELECTRONIC VOTING S SYSTEMS
The Machines
Electronic voting (e-voting) is a generic term that is applied here to refer to all aspects of voting that involves some element of casting or counting of votes by electronic means. It may involve any, or a combination, of the different methods identified by Fisher (2003):
Electronic counting (e-counting) refers to those systems that provide some form of automated count of votes that are cast using traditional methods (i.e. by physically marking a ballot paper by hand), whether in a polling station or by some other remote form such as postal ballots. While most forms of e-voting are likely to include some element of electronic counting, the term is reserved here to refer to those systems that only involve electronic systems in the counting of the votes

Electronic machine voting involves the use of dedicated machines to record votes for later counting. Machines may be sited either within polling stations or in other suitable locations where the public gather or have general access, such as leisure or shopping centers. These technologies may include, among others:
i. Touch screen systems that enable voters to cast their vote by touching relevant parts of a screen. These systems are used extensively in the Netherlands and were tested in three UK local government elections in 2000 - Bury, Salford and Stratford- upon-Avon
ii. PC based technologies that enable voters to cast their vote using a combination of screen and keypad (or a mouse) to register their ballot. This type of system is currently used in Brazil. Static or mobile kiosks that are located at convenient points within a constituency (but not in polling stations) or are transported around to different points to facilitate voting (for example, to workplaces, hospitals, elderly people's homes and so on). These systems use either keypad or touch screen technology to allow voters to cast their ballot.
Collectively, these types of systems are often known as Direct Recording Electronic
(DRE) machines.
iii. Remote Voting by Electronic Means (RVEM) is the other extreme of e-voting. It involves voting from places other than designated polling places and may involve a number of different technologies including:
a. Telephone voting using touch-tone telephones to register a vote. This type of system may operate either through fixed (land) line telephone systems or cellular (mobile) telephones Within the UK such voting systems have been used for advisory referendums in some local authorities (Milton Keynes, Bristol and Croydon)
b. SMS text voting using the Short Message Service (SMS) facility on mobile telephones to cast a ballot
c. Internet voting may be developed to allow individuals to vote from anywhere using the internet.
d. Interactive Digital Television (DTV) using the interactive capacity of evolving facilities to enable voters to cast their ballots via their televisions.
Ennis (2004) describes various types of electronc voting systems and their function that includes
Direct Recording Electronic: Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines are often favored because they can incorporate assistive technologies for handicapped people, allowing them to vote without involving another person in the process. However, most DRE's do not keep a voter verifiable paper ballot for re-counts and audits, making them arguably the least secure of all voting systems invented to date.
Mark-sense (optical scan) voting: In mark-sense voting the user marks a paper ballot and feeds it into a ballot box. The votes may be tallied by automatic sensors at a central location or at the precinct. With precinct-tallied votes, the systems usually verify that the ballot is legitimate as they accept the ballot. Improper marks on the ballot are the primary cause of problems with mark-sense voting. The marks may be inadvertent, accidentally outside the prescribed locations, made with an incompatible writing instrument, or incomplete.
Punch card voting: With punch card ballots, voters create holes in prepared ballot cards to indicate their choices. There are two main known vendors of this systems, Datavote and Votomatic. Datavote systems use a cutting tool and vacuum to clean away material from unperforated cards indicating the voters' choices. Votomatic machines require the voter to punch out a perforated rectangle from the card using a stylus.
The Datavote systems tend to have higher accuracy than Votomatic machines. Votomatic machines suffer from all manner of problems related to handling the perforated cards - problems that featured prominently in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election
Internet voting: With Internet voting people cast their ballots online, generally via a web interface, although email voting has occasionally been tried. With web voting the voter navigates to the proper election site using a web browser on an ordinary computer system (PC) and authenticates himself or herself to see the appropriate blank ballot form presented onscreen. The voter then fills out the ballot form and, when satisfied, clicks the "cast vote" button to send the completed ballot back to the election server.
Telephone voting: Telephone voting allows people to call different telephone numbers to indicate preference for different options, or a voter might call one number and indicate a preference by pressing buttons in a menu system. Its main drawback is the difficulty in verifying the identity of the voter and in permitting only one vote per person. Its chief advantage is the ease in getting people to participate
Some corporations routinely use Internet voting to elect officers and Board members and for other proxy elections. However, its use for public elections, where the security, privacy, and auditability standards are much higher, is generally considered prohibitively dangerous because, besides all of the dangers of ordinary electronic voting, there are additional severe security problems inherent in the PC and in the Internet that have no good solutions with current technology.
The election system of Buenos Aires for example is fairly simple. The voting machines are similar to an automatic teller machine, consisting of a metal cabinet with a numeric keyboard, a computer screen, a hard disk and a printing mechanism that will provide voters with a paper record. Voters will cast their ballots discreetly behind privacy curtains

Upon arriving at the booths, voters will hand their identity cards to an election official - no change from the normal procedure - who then will enter the citizens' personal information into a small terminal. Voters then will go behind the curtain to type a number corresponding to the candidate of their choice. A picture of the candidate will pop up on the screen immediately.

If the voter's choice has been read correctly, the voter will press a green key, finalizing the choice. If not, the voter simply presses a red key to correct the mistake. In case a voter is not willing to cast his or her ballot for any candidate on the slate, there is a white key for the "none of the above" vote. After a vote is entered, the machine makes a sound and prints a paper record.

Alternatively, there are other systems as used in India. The Indian Election process is distributed in such a way that there are never more than 1500 voters for a single polling booth. So, even if armed men capture the polling station, they cannot cast 1500 bogus votes in less than 5 hours, and Indian police is not as slow as the Hollywood movies project them to be. No voter has to travel more than 2 Kilometers to cast his vote. It is fairly easy for an election officer or opposition political agents to identify people who attempt to appear twice with different identity. (The Ink on the finger is the main reason). Also:
a. The System accepts only 5 votes in a minute.
b. The Government Issued Voter Identity Card, through Public Distribution System’s Ration Card, when he enters the polling station.
c. Voter's finger is marked with a special ink, in such a way that the ink spreads from finger skin to nail in a small dot. One cannot remove this Ink without hurting himself. The Ink washes away in two week's time.
d. The Electoral Officer then Presses a button on his Control Unit that releases a single ballot, for the voter to use, this of course is electronic so it just enables the Voting unit to register one Vote.
e. Now Voter enters the voting Booth, and presses a Button in front of name and Election Symbol of the Candidate. This action blinks an ‘LED’ in front of the candidate's name and sounds a loud and long Beep, that declares that the vote is casted.
And here is how the results are obtained from the machines.
a. After the voting is over, electoral officer presses the Close switch on the Control Unit, after which the unit registers no votes. The total number of the Votes registered are noted by all stake holders (political party agents) and then the control units are put into its own special carrying case, and sealed for transport.
b. Control Units from all Polling stations are transported to the nearest District headquarters.
c. On the day of counting the seals of the Control Units are opened. The control unit has a Results Button that is physically secured by a protective seal, this button is pressed to obtain the results. The Machine gives the Serial number of the Candidate, and the votes that he has won.
d. The Election commission takes a decision to ask for a re-election if the machines were found to be tempered with. Or if the count of signatures or thumb impressions (yes, India's illiterate also take part in the democracy) on the voter register do not tally with the number of votes registered by the Voting Machine. In this election, about a 100 polling booths, (I think) were asked to conduct the election again. This number is small, for the size of Indian elections.
e. In case of disputes, the machines are preserved for the courts to decide upon, other machines are used for next election after resetting the memory.
Though these procedures are easy, many Nigerian citizens are not educated enough enough or have the required skills to operate the system unaccompanied, there is urgent need to educate the citizenry on the usage of the EVS, however, there is no current effort being made to educate the citizenry even when the election period is moths away, this is an uneasy situation.
PROBLEMS ASSOCIATED WITH THE VOTING MACHINES
There are many potential problems of the electronic voting machines. These probles stem from the mechanical nature of the machines and corrupt tendency of the machine operators. Electronic voting machine manufacturers and state governments are responding to legitimate concerns with corporate campaigns. SourceWatch (2004) observed that
A voting machine provides vast potential for electoral fraud.. After the Florida 2000 debacle, a "solution" to the ballot counting problem, commonly advocated in both the U.S. and India, was an upgrade of the hardware and software systems used to "punch" and to count ballots. Electronic voting machines have been installed in several states in response to a federal mandate. These electronic machines leave no paper trail by which vote verification or audit can take place.
More reports from the magazine observed that the programming of the voting machines is secret, or at least it was until Diebold's source code was discovered on an insecure ftp server and analysed by independent experts. There is no way for the voter to know his vote was correctly registered, and no way to verify the count when it's done.

The magazine noted that in Georgia, where Diebold Election Systems machines were used, a handful of voters found that when they pressed the screen to vote for one candidate, the machine registered a vote for the opponent. The magazine x-rayed the problems with electronic voting machines thus:
In Alabama, a computer glitch caused a 7,000-vote error and clouded the outcome of the gubernatorial race for two weeks. But more critically, computer scientists charge that the software that runs the machines is riddled with security flaws. In India, the protest has been even more widespread, as the ruling party has proceeded with automating the electoral process uniformly nation-wide - in a democracy of over one billion people, and few resources to challenge results.
The magazine also observed that scientists have analyzed portions of Diebold software source code that was mistakenly left on a public internet site and concluded that a teenager could manufacture "smart cards" and vote several times.Insiders could program the machine to alter election results without detection. All machines had the same password hard-wired into the code. And in some instances, it was set at 1111, a number laughably easy to hack. Because there is no paper or electronic auditing system in the machine, there would be no way to reconstruct an actual vote.
Gumbel (2003) warned that the 2004 United States presidential election may be compromised by new voting machines that computer scientists believe are unreliable, poorly programmed and prone to tampering. Later investigation revealed that tens of thousands of touch screen voting machines may be less reliable than the old punchcards, which famously stalled the presidential election in Florida in 2000, leaving the whole election open to international ridicule.

Dill (2005) argued "These machines do not allow the voters to check that their votes are accurately and permanently recorded. No one can prove that the machines are trustworthy." He further observed three insidences:
the three leading voting machine manufacturers are substantial Republican campaign donors. Walden O'Dell of Diebold, in Ohio, wrote a letter to Republican supporters saying he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year". Some theorists view it as a grave threat to democracy itself: "The rush towards computerisation is very dubious," Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard University, said. "It takes away the checks and balances of a democratic society." Parallel concerns were raised in India where the entire country was shifted to a single voting machine technology vended by companies close to the ruling party. India ran its first full election using only these machines in 2003.
In the aftermath of the U.S.’s 2004 election, McLean (2004) declared that computerized machines lost votes, subtracted votes instead of adding them, and doubled votes. Because many of these machines had no paper audit trails, a large number of votes would never be counted. And while it was unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of the presidential election, the Internet was buzzing with rumors and allegations of fraud in a number of different jurisdictions and races.
Technologies get in the way of accuracy by adding speeds. Each additional step means more potential errors, simply because no technology is perfect. Consider an optical-scan voting system. The voter fills in ovals on a piece of paper, which is fed into an optical-scan reader. The reader senses the filled-in ovals and tabulates the votes. This system has several steps: voter to ballot to ovals to optical reader to vote tabulator to centralized total. At each step, errors can occur. If the ballot is confusing, then some voters will fill in the wrong ovals. If a voter doesn’t fill them in properly, or if the reader is malfunctioning, then the sensor won’t sense the ovals properly. Mistakes in tabulation, either in the machine or when machine totals get aggregated into larger totals, also cause errors. A manual system (tallying the ballots by hand and then doing it again to double-check) is more accurate simply because there are fewer steps.
Bugs in software are commonplace, as any computer user knows. Computer programs regularly malfunction, sometimes in surprising and subtle ways. This is true for all software, including the software in computerized voting machines.
openDemocracy.com reviewed some elections conducted with the new electronic voting machines and recorded thus:
In Fairfax County, VA, in 2003, a programming error in the electronic voting machines caused them to mysteriously subtract 100 votes from one particular candidate’s totals. In San Bernardino County, CA in 2001, a programming error caused the computer to look for votes in the wrong portion of the ballot in 33 local elections, which meant that no votes registered on those ballots for that election. A recount was done by hand. In Volusia County, FL in 2000, an electronic voting machine gave Al Gore a final vote count of negative 16,022 votes. The 2003 election in Boone County, IA, had the electronic vote-counting equipment showing that more than 140,000 votes had been cast in the Nov. 4 municipal elections. The county has only 50,000 residents and less than half of them were eligible to vote in this election.
Another issue is that software can be hacked. That is, someone can deliberately introduce an error that modifies the result in favor of his preferred candidate. This has nothing to do with whether electronic voting machines are hooked up to the internet on election day. The threat is that the computer code could be modified while it is being developed and tested, either by one of the programmers or a hacker who gains access to the voting machine company’s network. It’s much easier to surreptitiously modify a software system than a hardware system, and it’s much easier to make these modifications undetectable.
Similar to this is that these problems can have further-reaching effects in software. A problem with a manual machine just affects that machine. A software problem, whether accidental or intentional, can affect many thousands of machines and skew the results of an entire election.
Each stage in the development of voting machines brings in additional solution to the contemporary problem of voting and election at large. However these solutions do not suffice, because they do not totally address the dialectical social problems of voting, the machines have their individual shortcomings and they are easily manipulated and corrupted giving time and resources. Thus while they are arguably bring some degree of solutions, social economic environments of where they are applied are critical to their degree of success. These factors will be discussed in the next chapters.
Comparatively, the voting machines appear to succeed in some area and fail in others. Considering Nigeria situation, the machines may be good but are not the ideal solution. The machines may have worked elsewhere but may not work in Nigeria. First the structures and functions of the machines Nigeria will use as planned by the Independent National Electoral Commission are imported, and will not address the Nigeria peculiar issues as it may have done in the country of origin.
Nnoli (2003) observed that central to the question of voting is who is eligible to vote. There have been incessant issues of ballot stuffing in the past. The machines may dictate multiple voting by one person but it may not dictate voting by ineligible persons like prisoners, mad people and children. Shively (1991) corroborated this and argued that it is evident that not all those who are entitled to vote do vote and vice versa, those who are eligible to vote may be corruptly disqualified, denied the opportunity to vote by deliberate omission/cancellation or by gerrymandering. In 1999, many who registered during l registration process for the 1999 election did not find their names in the voters register at the end and were thereby rendered ineligible to vote. The use of electronic voting machines does not guarantee the absence of this situation especially when is deliberately and corruptly done by the custodian of the machines.
Another issue of concern in that Nigeria lacks the accurate demographic data of its population. Nigeria does not have data on its adult population that is eligible to vote. The machines are garbage in garbage out (GIGO), what is fed into it is what it stored and uses for programming and calculation. Wrong information fed into the machines means failure of the system.
Ball & Peters (2000) argued that voting does not necessarily decide who takes office as electoral corruption may distort the people’s choice. As previously discussed, even the manufacturers of the voting machines who are in partisan politics may configure the machine in favour of their choice candidates.

ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEM AND NIGERIAN SOCIO-ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT
PUBLIC LITERACY LEVEL AND FAMILIARITY WITH THE TECHNOLOGY
Two significant differences between the populations of the developed countries and the developing countries like Nigeria are the level of literacy and familiarity with computers and other devices using keyboards, screens, and stored data. While the current Australian literacy rate for adult population (15 years and above) is put at 98%, Nigeria records 68 of same (CIA Fact Sheet, 2005). The Nigerian National Population Commission puts the overall literacy rate at 45%. Brazil records 86% for its adult population of 15 years and above. These days, in the developed countries like United States, literacy is almost never raised as an issue with respect to the choice of voting equipment, but in Nigeria, where the levels are much lower, literacy remains a serious issue consideration.
The public literacy level is one of the greatest challenges to the decision of the INEC to use the EVS in the up-coming elections in Nigeria. Compared with India and other countries whose footsteps Nigeria is following their in the adoption of the EVS, literacy rates are not same. Mojeed (2006) sampling the opinion of many Nigerians noted that that many view that
and dishonesty, one wonders why the INEC Chairman, Maurice Iwu, a learned Professor, and who should know Electronic voting system is too advanced for the Nigerian polity. Even in advanced countries of the world, where you have high level of transparency and integrity, they do tamper with electronic voting device. The case of America in the George W. Bush/Al Gore presidential election is a notable example. With the high level of literacy in America compared with the low level of illiteracy in Nigeria and Nigeria’s proverbial non transparency better, will now insist that we are going for electronic voting.
According to Mojeed, many Nigerians argued that the electronic voting device would be tampered with in Nigeria considering the type of people in the country, Nigeria should continue with the secret ballot system and develop with it until the country is able to get credible, free and fair election. He ran excerpt from Alhaji Adesina;
From my own consideration, the adoption of the electronic voting device by INEC is a grand deceit to tamper with the result of the 2007 general elections. I call for its total rejection," he said also reacting to the electronic voting as being contemplated by the commission
Another prominent opposition reported by Mojeed was Secretary to the Plateau State Government (SSG), Mr. Litta Shindai, who also aruged that the greater percentage of the Nigerians are still illiterate, and as such cannot manage the system effectively well. According to him, opting for the e-voting would mean disenfranchising tens of millions of Nigerians who may not be lettered.
Brazil developed an illiteracy management program vis-à-vis the EVS to reduce the impact of the populations’ inability to read and write on EVS. India also developed and used logos on paper ballots.
To overcome this barrier to the electoral process, Saltman (1998) noted that Brazil adopted a voting system in which candidates can be identified easily by number, as well as by name. Candidates for the two offices voted on in the October 1996 election were each given an individual two- or five-digit number. (The longer identifier was necessary for the second office as there could be more than one candidate from the same party.) Before the election, people displayed posters and placards, even T-shirts, emblazoned with favorite candidates' numbers.
The Brazilian national election authority, reasoned that illiterates could differentiate among numbers much more easily than among names. The voting equipment included a ten-digit numerical keyboard with three other keys for voting actions and a liquid-crystal display screen. When a voter entered the chosen candidate's number, digit-by-digit, on the keyboard, the names of the office, candidate, and party appeared on the screen, and in the case of the first office, the candidate's picture appeared as well.
Saltman (1998) reported that the decision proved sound. Their pervasive television spots instructed people regarding the new system, and helped overcome some voters' lack of familiarity with keyboards and screens. Election observers from many countries reported that people of all classes used the system successfully. Brazil's success with the 1996 election demonstrates the value of centralized development.
Unlike Brazil and India who planned for the illiteracy management in the use of EVS as part of the effort to make the EVS successful, Nigerian election manager are yet to initiate a process in this regards, yet the next national election during which INEC insist it would use the system is few months away. It is also baffling that few months away to the said election when INEC ought to be educating the masses on the EVS it is still in the debate to persuade the National Assembly to accept and support its usage, it thus cast doubt when and if ever INEC will have time to educate the masses on the System, much less planning for illiteracy management on the EVS. Contrary to what is obtainable in many countries that have used the system, great number of the population have knowledge of computer or at least with time and gradual and incremental changes were conversant with the similar electronic voting machines and thus needed little adjustment. In the case of Nigeria, it is total and abrupt change that is being contemplated.
Integrity and Security
Another concern in Nigeria about EVS is the perceived insecurity of the machines and ballots. The security of transportation, from election headquarters to polling stations, of disks or cartridges containing initialization and voter registration data, and the return of those devices with election results after polls close is also an issue of serious concern. Counterfeiting, data modification, or interchange of the devices must be prevented. This protection can be accomplished with the use of modest cryptographic methods. Relatively advanced Nigeria may not have the necessary staff to undertake this activity.
Voter registration, including voter verification at polling stations, is another area in which assurance of accuracy, integrity, and security are necessary for public confidence in reported election results. There are several ways to replace paper-based verification. These methods require a match with pre-stored voter data at the polling station. One such technique is signature-comparison, but as Saltman (1998) pointed out, it may not work in societies with high illiteracy rates. A second method is to issue each voter an identification card with the voter's photograph and containing stored data (either magnetic stripe or chip-based) that can be swiped or inserted in a reader at the polling station. A third method is the matching of a unique physical characteristic of the voter, such as a fingerprint. However, fingerprinting all voters may not be acceptable in Nigeria, where the concept of information privacy is important, and fingerprinting is associated primarily with maintenance of a criminal record. However the challenges here is that there is no known effort to put these in place in Nigeria. The National identity card project for example that would have served as starting point and of great assistance has been a sham.
Political Environment
In most of the developed countries and perhaps some of the developing countries that have adopted EVS, their political environment differ from that of Nigeria. First, the country is just beginning once again to experiment democracy after many years of military rule. The political orientation, the political system as well as the practice of democracy vary greatly with Nigeria with what is now obtainable in these nations.
In the United States (US) for example, Saltman (1998) observed that the U.S. tradition in administering elections is one of local autonomy. Administration is decentralized to the states and, most often further decentralized to counties, cities, and sometimes lesser units. Local governments typically have the right to select their own vote-counting system, often with state-mandated conditions. Similarly, voter registration lists traditionally have been maintained by local government, although there is a trend toward state-maintained lists because of the high mobility of the population, both intra- and interstate, and concern about duplicate registrations.
In Nigeria, the overwhelming tendency is for offices at the national level to plan, develop, and install modern voter registration and voting systems for the entire nation any time there would election. There is no continuity or pre-stored voters’ data or even population data that can be referred to as in many developed countries who Nigeria purport to copy.
Mojeed (2006) reported
Former Governor of Kogi State, Mr. Abubakar Audu. He said Nigeria was not democratically ripe to adopt the proposed e-voting system He said, "I must say that we are not politically sophisticated enough to adopt e-voting. This is a country where a vast majority is still finding it difficult to know how to thumbprint the parties they wish to vote. There is still massive illiteracy all over the place. "I see the adoption of the system as a ploy to bring more confusion into our already confused electoral system.
In the opinion sample ran by Mojeed, some Nigerians argued that electronic voting system will be easily manipulated and may turn out to be worse in election rigging than the current voting system while others alleged that the INEC chairman is doing the bidding of the PDP that wants to perpetuate itself in power as the use of electronic system in the 2007 elections will be manipulated by the PDP to remain in power.
Pindiga (2005) reported that apart from the ruling party that is a protagonist of the EVS, a number of other parties kicked against the idea, saying it was part of the ruling party's grand scheme to perpetuate itself in power. He x-rayed the opinion of the parties
The parties opposed to e-voting accused INEC of complicity in a ploy to rig the 2007 elections in favour of the PDP even before polling kicks-off. Electronic gadgets, they argued, were "garbage-in-garbage-out" which could be made to churn out preset results in favour of the ruling party. They also cautioned that with barely 16 months to the polls, there was no adequate time for preparations and massive production of the e-voting machines for the 2007 polls. An official of one of the opposition parties, Daily Trust learnt, told the INEC chairman that since he (Iwu) was a card-carrying member of the PDP, his impartiality was doubtful.
Supporters of e-voting insisted that since India used it successfully, Nigeria could not fail. However what the proponents of e-voting in Nigeria are yet to harmonise is the political environment of Nigeria and that of India. Also, supporters argued further that it was time that the nation started thinking of how to perfect its democracy by making its polls error-free, something they said e-voting would readily provide, but they have not assured Nigerians the availability of the infrastructure, public enlightenment on EVS, conducive political environment and its cost effectiveness.
Cost Effectiveness
Most countries using electronic voting system, especially the developed countries and India have the history of gradual and incremental modification of the existing voting system to newer version. This allows for cost effective improvement on the existing ones. The changes are at any given point in time weighed against the additional cost effectiveness of the new innovation against the old ones. Here in Nigeria, the proposed system is outright change over from the old to new without the incremental modification from the existing ones that allows for the cost benefit analysis.
The history of administering elections in many developed countries like, Canada, Australia, Britain and United States is characterized as incremental change that focused on the cost effectiveness of the existing system. In the 1890s, the adoption of a standard paper ballot, called the "Australian Ballot" was considered to be a significant advance. The mechanical lever machine came into use in 1898. By the late 1950s, about one-half of all voters in the US for instance cast their ballots on these machines. Saltman (1998) observed that this hundred-year-old technology is still employed in some jurisdictions today. The non-ballot DRE system, in which voters use push-buttons or touch screens, had its beginnings in the middle 1970s. This system, sold by several manufacturers, is poised to replace many of the non-ballot mechanical lever machines currently in use.
Nigeria does not have enough time for the incremental approach, or the resources to allow each local jurisdiction to select its own methods. Political stability demands free and fair elections, undertaken efficiently and effectively with systems that significantly reduce, if not totally prevent, fraud in both voter registration and ballot counting. Therefore, instead of opting for incrementalism or technological diversity, Nigeria want to undertake a immediate centralized, planned, top-down process of replacing paper-based voter identification and balloting with high-tech methods.
This idea may sound plausible but the cost is however alarming. In a country where over 60% of the population live below the poverty level, the cost of such immediate and urgent swap is too burdensome. The sudden introduction of electronic voting system will cost more, yet doubtful effective.
It is note worthy that INEC requested at least sixty billion, five hundred million naira (N60, 500billion) for its operations, if it would guarantee credible elections in 2007. On the floor of the Senate, on Wednesday, January 25, 2006 the INEC chairman, Prof. Iwu, told the Senate Electoral Committee that further delay in appropriating the required money for the commission would hinder the smooth conduct of the polls. He told the committee to get ready to share in the blame if the commission failed to deliver credible elections in 2007 because of a cut in the proposed N60.5 billion. "I want to implore the Senate to approve the said fund, because any kobo less than this N60.5 billion will be a threat to our democracy," Prof. Iwu asserted. So far, N20 billion had been proposed for the purchase of Electronic Voting Machines in the 2006 Appropriation bill
Infrastructure
The lack of modern infrastructure in the rural parts of Nigeria should be considered in the selection of any type of voting system. If INEC chooses a precinct-located vote-counting system, rather than a centrally located one, computerized machines, either DRE devices or computers with ballot-readers, will be needed at many remote locations. Difficulties in logistics, including equipment transportation and maintenance, are more pronounced.
Another consideration is the need for a reliable power source. The current epileptic power supplies in Nigeria and total absence of power in some areas constitute a great challenge to the running of the EVS. The Brazilian system employed the use of external battery to power the system, and in the developed countries like US, the issue of power source is not as problematic as in Nigeria, in fact it is a non-issue. . In Brazil as Saltman observed, the country acquired new DRE units that can run on a 12-volt automobile battery. However, Nigeria has the worst state of power supply, but how INEC plans to overcome this dilemma remains yet uncertain.
In very hot, cold, or humid areas, the lack of a controlled environment also may be a concern. The storage facilities that will guarantee the safety of the machines against weather, damage and even theft or tampering is very crucial.
The centralized ballot-counting system which is being planned by INEC that could be less expensively employed in the largest city or town in a rural region, may overcome many of the logistics problems in supplying equipment, but would still demand the transportation of ballots to and from remote sites.
A centralized DRE system requires transporting the voters themselves to the central location. As a result, urban and rural citizens may have to use different voting systems
Mojeed (2006) quoted Former Governor of Kogi State, Mr. Abubakar Audu, thus
Nigeria is not democratically ripe to adopt the system. "Then the low level of infrastructural development in Nigeria are well known to Iwu. With all these, has he got any justification that we should go for electronic voting? Definitely, the INEC Chairman must have a hidden agenda
Data and Information
While the principle of e-voting seems simple enough, arguments for its implementation are somewhat more complex. Many countries that practice the system have the demographic data of its population that aids the planning and operation of the system. The data guides the decision regarding what should be provided and where, as well as the information on what will work in a particular area and for a particular set of people. In Nigeria, such data does not exist. The country lacks the basic data of its population and its demographic combination. This makes planning a very difficult issue.
In UK for example, while preparing for the adoption and implementation of electronic voting system, they had relevant demographic data that guided the choice of the type of the EVS they adopted. The 2002 publication of the Local Government Association of UK x-rayed the demographic data of the kingdom
By the General election after next …much of the ground should have been prepared for an e-enabled election, offering those who want it the opportunity to vote electronically the possibility include: some may opt to use the fixed line telephone from their homes to cast their vote (93% of UK homes now have fixed line phones and further 6% have mobile phones instead); some use mobile phones to cast their ballot from any location that they feel like (73% of UK adults now have mobile phones); people working away from home or on holidays abroad may use the internet to cast ballot from anywhere in the world (currently 53% of UK adult have used the internet); those who have access to digital TV (currently 8.3 million subscribers) may use interactive capacity that many digital TVs incorporate to cast vote; some may find the current system of postal voting on demand, (1.4 million voters chose to cast a postal ballot in 2001 General election) …many will still prefer the traditional activity of attending a polling station and casting their vote in person.
This type of data is lacking in Nigeria yet the country is purporting to follow the footstep of these developed countries when it does not have the least of the supporting data and instrument needed to implement the system.
Acceptability
The national Assembly conducted public hearing in the six geo-political zones of the country in January 2006 on the use of the machines, the chairman of the committee on the hearing Hon. Hamisu Shira, revealed that the views collated during the exercise was not favourable to the use of the machines. "People vehemently rejected the use of EVM as it has not been tested in the country before now," he said. He noted that some of the people that presented memoranda at the hearing pointed out that the United States (US) tested the machine for 10 years and Brazil for 15 years before adopting it. "My worry is that we in the National Assembly have not taken a position on the use of the device”
If the trustworthiness of the future elections are to be achieved, the people must be consulted, carried along and they ought to understand and accept the new voting system. Their understanding of the new system is crucial for them to participate and as well monitor the operation and effectiveness of the system. Any thing less than the peoples’ consent in the introduction of the new voting system is an aberration and will be rejected by the people. It is therefore the role of INEC and other proponent of the change to convince and get the peoples’ consent.
Corruption
If the plan by INEC works out, when millions of Nigerians go to their polling places to cast their ballots in 2007, they will use a new fangled electronic voting machine and register their votes with a touch of the screen. No hanging chads, no butterfly ballots. These new voting machines, going by the experiences of the countries that have used them, provide no tangible voter-verified output or record of each individual ballot cast. If something goes wrong or if a ballot dispute arises, the computers’ word for it will have to be taken just like that. This could be a big step backward for honest elections.
The concern is not merely hypothetical. The possibility of malfunction or malicious tampering is a very real one. Warf (2004) noted that
Many news organizations, including The New York Times, have reported these machines are vulnerable to hacking and have produced unexplained data irregularities. Critics have documented instances of unauthorized source code "updates" being made just before an election. It has also been revealed that the president of Diebold, a major manufacturer of touch screen systems, is active in partisan politics, writing in a Republican fund-raising solicitation he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004.
One don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to think these electronic voting systems could be corrupted as he had noted.
If one machine is in error, an entire election could be swayed, with absolutely no way of correcting the mistake - certainly not a "minor problem." Zau (2003) ran a review of the partisan affiliation of the electronic machine providers in US that are likely to have their ways into Nigerian system:
In Illinois, Populex is the company that is creating the electronic voting system for the state. It was recently revealed that Ronald Reagan’s former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci now serves on the company’s five-member Advisory Board. Carlucci is also the chairman emeritus of The Carlyle Group, the defense contractor often called the "Ex-President's Club" because of the high profile partners and advisors on its payroll. These include key players from George W Bush’s inner circle, such as former President Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker III.
Zau observed that what the United States had was a company that was giving money, hand over fist and helping in campaign strategizing for a particular political party at the same time as making the machines that count the votes, he cited Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century; obviously there is no evidence of any conspiracy to tamper with election results - but the fact that such tampering is possible and that the people who are in a position to do it are highly partisan actors who may be able to fix elections without leaving any evidence is more than enough to warrant serious concern. One simply don't need actual evidence of actual election fraud in order to assert that there exist systemic flaws that need to be corrected. The appearance of honesty is just as important as the existence of actual honesty - and, right now, appearances are pretty poor.
The best-known type of attack on a voting system is one that changes the vote totals from what voters actually cast. “Historically, corrupt officials or partisans, one of the most famous examples being Tammany Hall in New York City, ‘the ballots made no result’, the counters made the result, have performed such tampering” (Fischer, 2003). Sometimes, others who stood to benefit from a particular outcome would be involved, as was reportedly the case with respect to allegations of vote buying in Indiana with money, Fisher observed.

This could potentially be done, for example, if voting or counting machines in precincts used modem connections for transmittal of tallies to the central election office, and a tamperer could use that connection before the polls closed to send results to another location. The goal of such tampering would generally be to influence the final vote tally so as to guarantee a particular result. That could be accomplished by several means, such as adding, dropping, or switching votes. Many of the features of modern voting systems — such as secret balloting and the use of observers are designed to thwart such threats.

The impact of such vote tampering depends on several factors. Two of the most important are the scale of an attack and the competitiveness of the contest. An attack would have to have sufficient impact to affect the outcome of the election. For that to happen, scale is critical. If tampering impacts only one ballot or one voting machine, the chances of that affecting the election outcome would be small. But tampering that affects many machines or the results from several precincts could have a substantial impact, although it might also be more likely to be detected. The scale of attack needed to affect the outcome of an election depends on what proportion of voters favor each candidate. The more closely contested an election is, the smaller the degree of tampering that would be necessary to affect the outcome.

It is noteworthy that Nigeria still record high in the global corruption. Apart from the corruption the EVS is vulnerable to, there are numerous other electoral malpractices and corruption that have eaten into the national fabric. Nigeria has a good number of records where the most favour candidate by the electorates turn out to lose the election while the most hated of the electorates swoop the polls – the Nigerian electoral magic.
Culture and Tradition
Nigeria is about to copy the US “voting success” enhanced by electronic voting machines, but this is based on a long term of changes US has made over the past 150 years to the systems they use to conduct elections which developed from a simple to complex machines. These changes have made fraud difficult, (though fraud cases still occur) and as a result, a culture of honesty has had the freedom to emerge among those who conduct elections. Nigeria has never employed any form of electronic voting machine in its elections and when it intends to it swiftly moved into imported complex one. The challenge is to make sure that, in introducing new voting technology, it does not introduce new opportunities for fraud and thereby weaken the nascent democracy on which the future and continued existence of the country rest.
The Prospects of Adopting Electronic Voting System in Nigeria
There are many potentials prospects electronic voting may offer when used in Nigeria. These potentials are not just possibilities but are realities. What those that oppose it application in Nigerian elections are arguing is the preponderance of the prospects over the numerous shortcomings of the machines and unprepared local environment.
In a view of Nigeria’s aspiration to join the list of countries practicing electronic voting system, voters will in a near future no longer be required to visit precinct polling places to cast their ballots. Voters will be able to cast ballots in their home precinct from any polling place, from voting kiosks in shopping malls, libraries and other public places, and from their home computers. These opportunities further provide numerous prospects, challenges as well as problems. The prospects include difficulties in rigging election, accessibility to disabled persons, quick counting and simplicity.
Electoral Riggings Made Difficult
There are patterns of electronic voting machines that would make rigging more difficult, and provide evidence of rigging, if it ever takes place. It will eliminate most of the complaints on which election petitions are based would protect their rights better. Electronic voting can be a better source of indisputable evidence for the electoral tribunals. Duru (2005) quoted Professor Maurice Iwu, the INEC chairman, he insisted that the system was not merely an Electronic Voting Machine as people have termed it nor will it be e-voting but a system which would ensure that even if some politicians destroy any of the components in their attempts to win at all costs, the devices would enable him to have the total number of votes cast in any of the polling booths across the country.

He further noted that, in order to beat the system whereby politicians buy up voters’ registers and in situations where non-existent voters are registered, it would be difficult for those who do not have genuine cards to cast their votes. He also promised that as a voter is casting his vote on the ballot box the system would be registering in 27,000 places at the same time adding: “Even if you snatch the ballot boxes, it will not have any effect because I will be seeing the results in my office in Abuja as the voting is going on throughout the country.
Iwu pointed out that the system is cheaper and that Nigeria can afford it since it happens to be the most effective way of correcting the several electoral problems that have bedeviled the country since independence.
Language Breakthrough
Each Each machine can easily be programmed to display ballots in different languages. The machines can be programmed in the local languages, or made to include numerous languages that are used locally. In each community the language that is predominantly used in could be called up and used to operate the system. The advantage with respect to ballots in different languages appears to be unique to electronic voting. Vinson (2005) presented the example of King County, Washington's demographics that required them under U.S. federal election law to provide ballot access in Chinese, although only 24 people in the county requested Chinese ballots in the September 17, 2002 primary election. This would of immense advantage for those who have difficulty in the understanding of english language as many local languages can be programed
Accessibility for Disabled Persons
The electronic machines can be made fully accessible for persons with disabilities. Vinson (2005) noted that there are certainly benefits to having computerized voting systems, one of the most important of which is the enfranchisement of blind and disabled voters, for whom the technology now exists to vote secretly and without assistance. He however noted that optical scanning, the only other method that rivals electronic systems for efficiency, and which, according to a CalTech/MIT study from July of 2001, many ballot systems that currently provides the highest degree of accuracy, cannot provide this service.
Electronic machines can use headphones and other adaptive technology to provide the necessary accessibility for the disabled, especially the blind
Simple and Convenience
Jacob (2005) quoting the chairman of Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) Professor Maurice Iwu, explained that voting machines will display ballots on flat panel displays, and voting will be a simple matter of touching the screen to pick a candidate. Voting machines connected to the web will add a new dimension; allowing voters to bring up candidate or issue group web pages if they need more information to make an informed choice.
Regarding the convenience, Jones (2000) argued that these new technologies would make voting far more convenient. More people will participate, higher voter turnout will lend greater legitimacy to the electoral process, and as a result, the tide of voter apathy that has swept the country since 1970 will come to an end.
As in the ordinary use of computer in everyday usage, activities are simplified with the aid of computer. The EVS as well enhances the simplicity and convenience of voting process as well as in counting and quick result delivery
Quick Counting
Similar to the issue of simplicity, electronic counting is no doubt substantially quicker than physically moving piles of papers to count preferences. “We will no-longer have to wait days for official election results, contenting ourselves with unofficial results gathered by the press” (Jacob, 2005) He posits that within minutes after the polls close, the network of voting machines will communicate with local and state computers to calculate the official election results.
With the aid of the computer operated counting, result of the election can be processed faster. Also the computer assisted counting will save time and money. The job that would take 200 persons two weeks to do may be processed with modern computers in less than 30 minutes.
It is accepted that human error is a part of any manual count of preferences. It may be that the complexities of counting vote counting can be more accurately handled by an electronic than human count.

The Problems of Adopting Electronic Voting System in Nigeria
Errors And Malfunctions
The challenges of the use of electronic voting from many quarters come because of errors and malfunctions that occur in real life elections. In the United States, it was reported according to Vinson, that on election day in 2004, 2269 machine problems were reported. Such can result in the rapid rollout of the unproven and vulnerable technology without the proper scrutiny that is due to an unproven system.
Jones (2004) also noted that in Fairfax County, Virginia in November 4, 2003. Machines quit, jammed the modems in voting systems when 953 voting machines called in simultaneously to report results, leading to a denial of service attack on the election. 50% of precincts were unable to report results until the following day. Also, some voters complained that they would cast their vote for a particular candidate and the indicator of that vote would go off shortly after. Had they not noticed, their vote for that candidate would have remained uncounted; an unknown number of voters were affected by this.

Warf (2004) observed that electronic counting algorithm had to be independently audited twice to ensure no errors occurred during the distribution of preferences. In Nigeria, how many would understand options of the machines? There is currently no known effort to audit the machines and their applications that would be used for the up coming elections.
Greater Possibility Of Large-Scale Electoral Fraud
Some people challenge the use of electronic voting because of its much greater possibility of large-scale electoral fraud, both from inside the electoral apparatus and from outside it. Ezulike et al (2005) x-rayed the opinion of stakeholders of non PDP extradition as being opposed to the idea of the INEC chairman, Professor Maurice Iwu who declared that his commission proposed use of electronic voting in future polls is irreversible just as he disclosed that only foreign observers and not monitors would be allowed to participate in the elections.
However, disagreeing with the commission, the respondents said adoption of electronic voting would make the nation’s electoral process prone to manipulation and was part of a plot to rig the polls in favour of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Campaign for Democracy (CD), in its reaction, stated that INEC’s declaration in that regard was "a shadow of the 2007 rigging plans by the present President Olusegun Obasanjo administration to perpetuate itself in power. INEC’s opposition to foreign monitors is coming against the backdrop of the exposition of foreign monitors on the 2003 election that it was not an election, a fact later confirmed by Nigeria’s court of law
Verifiability and Transparency
In current DREs, the actions that occur between ballot screen and the final vote tally are not subject to human observation. The voter sees a visual representation of the ballot on the computer screen or face of the DRE. When the voter pushes the button to cast the ballot, the machine records the votes electronically. That means that a voter cannot know if the machine recorded the choices the voter saw on the screen or some other choices, and an observer also cannot check to see if all ballots cast are counted correctly.

Other challenges of the use of electronic voting come from a theoretical point of view, humans are not equipped for verifying operations which occur in the microscopic scale within nanosecond timeframes. Thus, for people who did not program them, computers act just like black boxes and their operations can truly be verified only by knowing the input and comparing the expected output with the actual output. Under a secret ballot system, there is no known input, nor is there any expected output with which to compare electoral results. Hence, electronic electoral result cannot be verified by humans and the people need to have an absolute faith in the accuracy, honesty and security of the whole electoral apparatus (people, software and hardware). Requiring reliance on such faith is clearly not compatible with Democracy. Vinson (2003) posed mind-searching questions about the EVS;
Will electronic voting machines allow (1) a voter's verification of her or his choice, and (2) post-election auditing? Most of the current debate has swirled around the presence or absence of paper trails - some physical, printed scrap of evidence that a voter's selection is valid, and remains unchanged throughout its entire electronic life. Why, you may ask, should there be any debate about a paper trail? After all, HAVA stipulated "manual audit capacity" and a "permanent paper record." It turns out that various electronic machine vendors have interpreted the phrase "permanent paper record" to mean printing out results after the election. These vendors claim that voter verification occurs at the time the voter is reviewing his or her selections on the touch screen, and that auditing can occur electronically. And some computer scientists agree, at least in theory. But vendors that do offer paper ballot printing, and a growing number of influential computer scientists, argue that electronic voting machines must produce a printed paper ballot for bona fide voter verification, as well as a means for a valid recount in the event of a contested election.
Security and Evolving Threat Environment
The software used in electronic voting machines is often not available for public review, it could contain undetected mistakes or deliberate cheating. Warf (2004) noted that Clint Curtis, a former employee of Yang Enterprises, stated that, in 2000, at the request of Congressman Tom Feeney, who was then the Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Curtis developed a "vote fraud software prototype" that could alter machine results.

The fact that the elections go on smoothly is no comfort—the whole problem with electronic voting is that someone could swoop in and change votes without anybody knowing it or even without leaving a trace behind.
Vinson noted that Diebold Election Services, Inc. president admitted security flaws and disenfranchised voters in the March 2, 2004 California presidential primary using Diebold's TSx system for DRE voting. On April 30 California's secretary of state decertified all touch-screen machines and recommended criminal prosecution of Diebold Election Systems. The California Attorney-General decided against criminal prosecution, but joined a lawsuit against Diebold for fraudulent claims made to election officials. Considering the vulnerability of Nigeria to various forms of insecurity and fraud, how does INEC intend to solve these puzzles should they arise in Nigeria? Is there any means of checking them before hand?

While attacks that added, subtracted, or changed individual votes are of particular concern, other kinds of attacks also need to be considered. One type of attack might gather information that a candidate could use to increase the chance of winning. For example, if vote totals from particular precincts could secretly be made known to operatives for one candidate before the polls closed, 35 the results could be used to adjust get-out-the-vote efforts, giving that candidate an unfair advantage.
Another type of attack might be used to disrupt voting. For example, malware could be used to cause voting machines to malfunction frequently. The resulting delays could reduce turnout, perhaps to the benefit of one candidate, or could even cause voters to lose confidence in the integrity of the election in general. The latter might be of more interest to terrorists or others with an interest in having a negative impact on the political system generally. The INEC chairman, Prof. Iwu has argued that vote tampering will be detected from his office anywhere it happened but he has failed to convince Nigerians that his own office, even staff or the machine vendors can be trusted.
The growing use of information technology in elections has had unique impacts on the threat environment. It provides the opportunity for new kinds of attacks and new kinds of attackers. As information technology has advanced and cyberspace has grown, so too have the rate and sophistication of cyber attacks in general. The number of reported computer-security violations has grown exponentially in the past decade, from about 100 in 1989 to more than 100,000 in the first three quarters of 2003 (Mercuri & Neumann, 2003) Fisher (2003) observed that
Potential threats may now come from many sources — amateur or professional hackers using the Internet, insiders in organizations, organized crime, terrorists, or even foreign governments. With respect to election tampering, some such attackers could benefit in traditional ways, but some, such as terrorists, might be interested instead in disrupting elections or reducing the confidence of voters in the electoral process. New and more ingenious kinds of Malware are constantly being invented and used. There are now tens of thous

This Paper was presented by Chidi Ezegwu at the National Scientific Conference of Clinical Psychologists, Eastern Zone at Choice Hotels Awka, Anambra State, Nigeria.

Theme: PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH OF NIGERIAN YOUTHS AND SUSTAINABLE NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Date 15 – 17 November 2005

ABSTRACT

It is a message that cannot be repeated too often: “there is no known cure for AIDS”. A cheap, effective vaccine appears years away. The only way to stop the spread of HIV infection is through prevention. HIV is a fragile virus. The ways it is spread are well known, as are the ways to prevent transmission.

Numerous theories have been postulated on how to make people acknowledge and keep to these ways of prevention as well as impact mitigation. However, the translation of these theories into practice in many African societies appears to be eluding owing partly to socio-cultural and economic factors of these societies and also to the nature of the foreign theories that are unknown to local environmental settings.

The work adapts the UNESCO/UNAIDS joint project, “A Cultural Approach to HIV/AIDS Prevention” which was launched in 1998, for local replication to identify guidelines and methods for using cultural approaches and strategies to achieve more effective behavioural change towards HIV/AIDS issues. It elaborates on delivering culturally appropriate information/education/communication to effect behavioural changes.
The whole work portrays the assumption that greater efficiency and sustainability will be achieved when better understanding of the peoples’ motivation and reservations vis-à-vis changing their behaviours as regards to HIV/AIDS prevention and care are taking into considerations and appropriate intervention approached fine-tuned to address them.
INTRODUCTION
There are many different ways of contracting HIV.
There are just as many different ways of preventing HIV/AIDS.
There are many different groups of people exposed to HIV/AIDS.
There are many different ways of discriminating against people living with HIV/AIDS.
The WHYs, HOWs and WHOs change from CULTURE to CULTURE that is why we need: a culturally appropriate response to HIV/AIDS prevention and care (UNESCO, 2003)
Understanding of our culture, the nature of individual young people in the society, their psychology and their traditional backgrounds will go a long way to help educators, program managers and adult society working among young people or seeking to effect behavioural change among them to produce a work plan fine-tuned to suit their psycho-social nature so as to be more effective and their works to give better results.

Since the mid-eighties, the fight against HIV/AIDS has gradually mobilized governments, international agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). However, it became evident that despite massive action to inform the public about the risks, behavioral changes were not occurring as expected. The infection continued to expand rapidly and serious questions began to emerge as to the efficiency of the efforts undertaken in combating the illness. Experience has demonstrated that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is a complex, multifaceted issue that requires close cooperation and therefore multidimensional strategies. The establishment of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in 1994 initiated a new approach to the prevention and care of this disease. Following a proposal made by UNESCO’s Culture Sector to the UNAIDS Program, on taking a cultural approach to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment for sustainable development, a joint project “A Cultural Approach to HIV/AIDS: Prevention and Care” was launched in May 1998. The goals were to stimulate thinking and discussion and reconsider existing tools.

Taking a cultural approach means considering a population’s characteristics – including
lifestyles and beliefs- as essential references to the creation of action plans. This is indispensable if behavior patterns are to be changed on a long term basis, a vital condition for slowing down or for stopping the expansion of the epidemic.

The work benefits extensively from the Joint UNESCO/UNAIDS Project “A Cultural Approach to HIV/AIDS Prevention and Care” which was launched in mid-1998, in relation to the new approach to HIV/AIDS prevention and care inaugurated by UNAIDS. It also benefited from Advocates for Youth (1994) documents earlier publication on the issue under study. It however adapts and localizes the documents to Nigerian environment

Definitions of Youth
The word ‘youth’ invokes different feeling to different people and so with its definition. Many people and groups, including some international organisations have accorded different meaning to the concept. Webster’s Dictionary (1998) defines youth as the quality or state of being young; youthfulness; juvenility; the part of life that succeeds childhood; the period of existence preceding maturity or age; the whole early part of life, from childhood, or, sometimes, from infancy, to manhood. United Nations General Assembly and the U.S. Agency for International Development refer youths to ages of 15 to 24. However, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines children as up to age 18, thus providing theoretically more protection and rights to those up to age 18; there is no similar United Nations Convention on the Rights of Youth. Thus in the global context, youth is generally defined as the cohort between ages 15 and 24, the generation straddling childhood and adulthood.

The operational definition and nuances of the term “youth”, however, often vary from country to country, depending on the socio-cultural, institutional, economic, and political factors. The Nigerian National Youth Policy, 2001, defines a youth as all young persons of ages 18 – 35, who are citizens of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It notes that this category represents the most active, the most volatile, and the most vulnerable segment of the population socio-economically, emotionally and in other respects.

This work uses the terms youth, young people, young adults, and adolescents interchangeably – all referring to people 10 to 35 years of age, to include the Nigerian and UN definition of youths, unless otherwise specified. Definitions of youth are related to context, culture, programmatic goals, objectives, and other factors.
Defining Culture
Culture is an important element of the foundation of every society. Culture provides the framework for people's social behaviours, contributes to their feeling of community, and helps individuals form their identity. Culture may be described as the attitudes and behaviour that are characteristic of a particular social group or organization, and includes traditions that reflect norms of care and behaviour based on age, life stage, gender, and social class.

However, constraints arising from cultural traditions often limit young people's access to the information and services they need to make informed and responsible decisions about their sexual and reproductive lives. Because it is often used to justify social inequality and can be a roadblock to achieving the full spectrum of human rights, "culture" must be addressed vis-à-vis the rights of young people.

Starting from the premise that "rights are universal but cultures are different, it is important to understand the various cultural issues that are of great significance to young people worldwide, including such factors as information and communication technologies (ICTs) and media's influence on young people's choices.
It is pertinent to note here that religion plays a significant role in culture, as do social and political institutions such as media and communications, systems of education, and modes of governance.

In this sense, “A Cultural Approach to HIV/AIDS Prevention and Care”, represents a new contribution towards finding solutions to this apparently insuperable challenge. Its major methodological output aims at tailoring the content and pace of action to people’s mentalities, beliefs, value systems, capacity to mobilize and, as a consequence to accordingly modify national and local strategies and policies, project design and field work.
What does culture have to do with HIV/AIDS?
On the basis of the Mexico Declaration of 1982, culture is broadly understood within UNESCO to include: ways of life, traditions and beliefs, representations of health and disease, perceptions of life and death, sexual norms and practices, power and gender relations, family structures, languages and means of communication; as well as arts and creativity. From this definition, it is clear that culture influences attitudes and behaviours related to the HIV/AIDS epidemic: in taking or not taking risk of contracting HIV, in accessing treatment and care, in shaping gender relations and roles that put young people at risk of infection, in being supportive towards or discriminating against people living with HIV/AIDS and their families, etc.

The difficulty in establishing effective HIV/AIDS programmes comes from a lack of openness, in many societies, regarding sexuality, male-female relationships, illness and death, taboo subjects deeply rooted in the cultures.

Understanding what motivates peoples’ behaviours, knowing how to address these motivations appropriately, and taking into consideration peoples’ cultures when developing programs addressing HIV/AIDS are essential to changing behaviours and attitudes towards HIV/AIDS.

Cultural Components
An individual's culture strongly influences his or her behavior, beliefs, attitudes and values. This is not a surprising statement; we all have an understanding that many of our present-day beliefs and behaviors have their roots in what we learned growing up in our own particular cultures. One useful definition of culture refers to it as a body of learned beliefs, traditions, principles and guides for behaviour that are commonly shared among members of a particular group. It serves a map for both perceiving and interacting with the world.
The journey towards maximizing cultural approaches to achieve behavioural changes among youths in the intervention, prevention and impact mitigation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic among youths begins with the understanding of the cultural components as well as making effort to change the harmful aspects of our cultures. Keep HIV/AIDS prevention in mind; many of the cultural components are directly related.
Language and Communication Style Language and communication style refers to a wide variety of verbal and nonverbal patterns and behaviors, including social customs about who speaks to whom—both how and when.
Health Beliefs Health beliefs cover a range of assumptions about the causes of disease as well as the proper remedies for illness. While the "germ theory" of disease holds that sickness is caused by microscopic organisms such as bacteria and viruses, it is not the only explanation people have come up with for disease. Divergent beliefs are growing, even among scientific circles, that the mind can affect the body's health in surprising ways. In addition, "supernatural" theories of disease, including the belief that a particular disease results from spiritually unhealthy activity, are very common in our societies. In this category, different kinds of healers are sought out in cases of illness, including spiritualists, herbalists, shamans and others—like acupuncturists or homeopaths—who practice what is labeled as "alternative health care."
Family Relationships The family is the primary unit of society. In it, children are socialized into human society and into a culture's particular beliefs, attitudes, values and behaviors. The topic of family relationships include family structure, roles, dynamics and expectations. Sexuality Sexuality involves more than genital activity. It includes five major areas: sensuality, sexual intimacy, sexual identity, reproduction/sexual heath and sexualisation. These areas are described below. Sensuality is what enables people to feel good about how their bodies look and feel. It allows them to enjoy the pleasure their bodies can give to them and others. The need to be touched by others in loving ways, the feeling of physical attraction for another person, body image and fantasy are all part of sensuality. Sexual intimacy is the ability and the need to be emotionally close with another and to have that closeness returned. While sensuality refers more to physical aspects of our relationships, sexual intimacy focuses on emotional needs. Sexual identity refers to people's understanding of who they are sexually, including
1. gender identity (their sense of being male or female),
2. their gender role (what men and what women are supposed to do) and
3. their sexual orientation (which gender they have primary affectional and sexual attraction to).
Reproduction and sexual health is the most familiar aspect of sexuality. It includes all the behaviors and attitudes having to do with having healthy sexual relationships and having the ability to bear children. Sexualization is using sex to influence, manipulate or control other people. Termed the "shadow" side of sexuality, sexualization spans behaviors that range from mutually enjoyable to harmlessly manipulative to violent and illegal. It includes such behaviors as flirting, seduction, withholding sex, sexual harassment, sexual abuse, incest and rape.
Gender Roles
Gender roles refer to what is considered appropriate and acceptable behavior for men and women. There has been tremendous change in the notion of gender roles in the last 20 years and doors have been opened to women in education and occupation. There are, however, still many deeply held beliefs about which behaviors are feminine and which are masculine.
Religion
Religion refers to a specific set of beliefs and practices regarding the spiritual realm beyond the visible world, including belief in the existence of a single being, or group of beings, who created and govern the world. Ritual, prayer and other spiritual exercises are commonly part of religious practice.
Religious beliefs often provide guidance for behavior and explanations for the human condition. Religious beliefs and communities are often sources of strength for cultural groups coping with the demands of the majority culture. Religion can provide a sense of community and a basis for cohesion and moral strength within a cultural group. Religious communities can also serve as centers of support, resistance and political action.
Many, if not all, religions establish sexual norms. Most organized religions condemn homosexuality and so it is often difficult for gay, lesbian and bisexual people to find full acceptance and spiritual peace within their families' house of worship or religious tradition.
Second, the belief that AIDS is punishment from God for immoral behavior is not uncommon. Messina (1994) notes that in a small study of African-American women from an urban area two-thirds believed that AIDS is a fulfillment of prophecy regarding plagues from the Book of Revelations. A study of people’s attitudes about HIV/AIDS revealed that their deeply held religious views lead to the belief that AIDS is God's punishment for young people’s corruption by modern western culture. This belief was found to be most common with the older generation.
Third, the many Christian communities ban on any contraceptive use, even among married couples, makes it difficult to convince religious Christians and to use condoms. Fourth, fatalism is a significant barrier to HIV/AIDS prevention. Fatalism is the belief that life is pre-determined and that individuals are powerless to change what happens to them. Fatalism results from both the tremendous influence of religion and the reality of poverty and that it makes arguments for safer sex difficult.
To effect behaviour change among youths who may not find these religious doctrines and beliefs comfortable, it is necessary that strong advocacy and workshops to be organised for religious leaders and communities. While the belief augur well to practitioners of abstinence and strong believers of the faith, it is very difficult for many young people to understand and therefore constitutes an obstacle to behaviour change, since they cannot understand or appreciate the motive behind the belief or at least cannot endure the rigors of abstinence or change their sexual orientation.
The role of religious beliefs and the community in information and care
As seen in the various country reports, religious beliefs are closely related to representations of HIV/AIDS, its causes and effects. The spiritual and moral attitudes associated with these beliefs may be used to develop responsibility towards oneself and others with respect to the infection, and may also develop solidarity toward infected and sick people. Such solidarity is more specifically active among certain religious communities and spiritual leaders, for instance, Christian missionaries and Muslim
Imams.
Level of Acculturation
Acculturation is a process that occurs when two separate cultural groups come in contact with each other and change occurs in at least one of the two groups. While most changes are thought to occur only in immigrant groups in the urban areas, the dominant (mainstream) cultures in the all our societies have undergone changes as a result of contact with other cultures.
Individuals within racial or ethnic groups can be:
· acculturated—having given up most of the cultural traits of the culture of origin and assumed the traits of the dominant culture.
· bicultural—able to function effectively in the dominant culture while holding on to some traits of their own culture.
· traditional—holding on to a majority of the traits from the culture of origin while adopting only a few of the traits of the dominant culture.
· marginal—having little real contact with traits of either culture.
Individuals within any given cultural group can be anywhere along the continuum. For immigrants especially in our urban centers, it is common for variation to exist even within one family, with older generations holding onto traditional traits, and young people functioning more in a bicultural manner.

WHY YOUNG PEOPLE?
HIV/AIDS is increasingly a disease of the young and most vulnerable, particularly girls. More than a third of all people living with HIV/AIDS are under the age of 25, and almost two-thirds of them are women. Of the 5 million new infections in 2002, half were among young people. Preventing HIV among young people is at the core of UNICEF’s global response
Every minute of every day six young people between the age of 15 and 24 become HIV-positive. Yet young people remain alarmingly uninformed about the most basic facts about HIV and prevention. Sexual activity, the main route of transmission of HIV, begins in adolescence for the majority of people. Yet young people remain alarmingly uninformed about the most basic facts about HIV and prevention. In sub-Saharan Africa, where two girls are infected for every boy, half the teenage girls surveyed did not realize that a healthy looking person could be HIV-positive. In the Ukraine, 39 per cent of teenagers had never heard of AIDS or still believe HIV can be transferred through supernatural means.
Adolescence is also the time many young people are at risk of experimenting with drugs. Approximately 10 per cent of new infections worldwide – mostly among young people – result from the sharing of drug use paraphernalia. Young people often do not have the skills or the incentives to avoid starting doing drugs. Once they have started, many quickly progress from inhaling or snorting to injecting, which dramatically increases their risk of infection.
Establishing healthy behavioural patterns during adolescence is much easier than changing risky behaviour later on. Around the world, the evidence shows that wherever the spread of HIV is slowing or even declining, it is primarily because young men and women are being given the tools and the means to adopt safe behaviours. In fact, in every country where HIV transmission has been reduced, it has been among young people that the most spectacular reductions have occurred. But even when young people have the information they need, it is often not enough to make them act. They also need to develop ‘life skills’ – the attitudes and negotiating capacity to put what they know into practice and to make informed choices about sex, drugs and other issues
THE EFFECT OF CULTURE ON SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH POLICY AND PROGRAMMES FOR YOUTH
CULTURAL/SOCIETAL IMPACT OF HIV/AIDS
Many infected people remain unaware that they are HIV-positive, because testing systems are far from being available everywhere. When detected through HIV screening, the short- and long-term societal and cultural effects are generally disastrous for them and their families (or group). The professional and social rejection of the infected and sick frequently results in a serious crisis: destruction of personal and community ties, and deep moral, cultural and economic distress. For these reasons, infected people often tend not to inform their spouses or regular sexual/emotional partner. In other cases, people are not concerned with HIV/AIDS infection due to more pressing concerns associated with their “underprivileged” socio-economic situation. As for people in economically and socially superior positions (i.e. “sugar daddies”, people with authority in business, public, or educational sectors) they tend to regard themselves as “immune” from the disease because of their socio-economic standing. Many of those with professions that involve frequent mobility do not assume their responsibility towards occasional sexual partners. These professions include: truck drivers, peddlers, sailors, soldiers, mercenaries, itinerant merchants, officials, temporary workers in mining, industrial fishing, agriculture or construction. Thus the epidemic and prostitution are highly concentrated in activity zones related to these professions, especially along national borders. In the most extreme situations, the disease can result in an “AIDS rage”, where infected persons deliberately infect new sexual partners as a revenge or as a response to a supposed curse.
Attitude encountered among certain urban segregated groups of young people, is the deliberate participation in high-risk activities. Although they are conscious of the risk, they perceive it as a challenge, akin to a gambling-type behaviour. Finally, in areas where epidemiological risks are high and multiple (malaria, typhus, cholera, sleeping sickness, TB, STDs in general) and deadly dangers frequent (war zones, mined areas), people do not feel the same urge to crusade against a specific disease or deadly danger among others. The most serious obstacle to prevention, however, is the cultural shock experienced by the younger generations. They must at the same time face a world of materialistic interest, individualistic/selfish behaviour, harsh competition for employment, mass unemployment, poor housing or lack of accommodation, in other words daily “struggle for life”.
In many Nigerian societies, cultural taboos on sexuality have made it very difficult to create adequate policies and programme to deal with youth sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Sexuality itself is a difficult topic to broach in the public arena, and the idea of young people and sexuality introduces another level of difficulty. Even when laws and policies exist to protect youth's SRHR, cultural and religious climates may hinder their implementation.
For example, among Igbos, where there is widespread discomfort with sexuality, "accurate information on sexuality is scarce, and health care of any kind is hard to come by for young people in the area, who are seen as essentially healthy and not in need of service. Those who seek reproductive health services often are met by judgmental health providers, and are afforded little or no privacy in which to discuss their problems. In virtually all Nigerian societies, taboos on sexuality impede open communication and access to information about SRH. In some areas, low levels of literacy increase these problems.
Attention to the sexual and reproductive lives of young people in Nigeria arises from concern over national population momentum. Growing rates of HIV infection among young people also compels governments to look at SRHR education, less from concern for individuals than from concern about national goals and priorities.
Cultural and religious restrictions often mean that SRH is a part of a public health agenda, which is quite different from a rights-based approach to SRH. Public health policy usually looks at effects on entire populations and focuses less frequently on effects on individuals and their rights.
The constraints arising from cultural traditions often limit young people's access to the information and services they need to make informed and responsible decisions about their sexual and reproductive lives. Because it is often used to justify social inequality and can be a roadblock to achieving the full spectrum of human rights, "culture" must be addressed vis-à-vis the rights of young people.

Effect On Girls
Some cultural traditions and expectations place disproportionate constraints on girls and challenge the "physical and psychological health and integrity of individuals. This is most evident in the practices of marrying female children and very young women and female genital cutting (FGC).
Marrying girls at a young age is common in many cultures where girls are undervalued. They are an additional expense if dowry is to be paid; smaller dowries are one incentive for marrying girls earlier, as is the common belief that an early marriage ensures a long period of fertility. Early marriage may lead to early childbearing, with subsequent disruption of education as well as high rates of maternal morbidity and mortality.
FGC, which is till practiced in some part of Nigeria, is an important rite of passage that places female infants, children, and young women at risk of infection and infertility as well as of severe blood loss, shock, and even death. FGC is intended to curb female sexual desires or prevent sexual activity, and may be a cultural necessity for marriage. Young women often fear social rejection if they do not undergo the procedure. Cultural norms like this may place girls and young women at increased risk of HIV infection. Early marriage can lead to increased chance of infection, as young women tend to marry older men, who are at increased risk of being already infected. In these circumstances, most young married women cannot safely request their husband to use condoms.
THE ROLE OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION
Besides media and education, live communication is the major channel for developing relevant dialogue, discussion and counselling concerning HIV/AIDS prevention, care and support. It needs openness to initiating and strengthening relations with local stakeholders, community leaders, population key informants and opinion leaders. If they respect the local culture and people’s life conditions, the arts, sports and creativity can provide opportunities in this respect.
Informing/sensitizing at the local level
Informing and sensitizing activities are at the core of culturally appropriate prevention projects and of the development of new attitudes toward people with AIDS. Non-school education associations and groups can work in this perspective, provided they adapt a tailored approach using the following methods of communication:
• Discussion sessions (group or personal) with local leaders, modern or traditional, political and social (trade unions) or spiritual, including traditional healers;
• Medical/sanitary training for people working in prevention and care projects and welfare centres;
• Encouraging peer educators (individuals or groups) to speak to their family, age group, work or leisure time partners, with emphasis on prevention and care;
• Mobilizing infected or sick people to speak about their experiences;
• Opportunities: workplace, public events, sports game, cultural festivals, religious celebrations, funerals, markets, school, and meetings;
• Informal opportunities: discussions in bars, hostels, discotheques, sports fields, other entertainment places.
Cultural communication for behaviour change
• Informing people:
- “Translating” the initial situation, bringing together local and external resources, explaining constraints linked to the institutional context, emphasizing the “invisible” aspects of the epidemic expansion;
- Ascertaining that the community grasps the problem, can identify the means to solve it and the expected improvement, and is ready to get fully involved to ensure the success of prevention and care activities already undertaken.
The global media culture can be an independent force in the lives of young people, influencing behavioural and value patterns that differ from those of their elders. Some argue that ICTs carry a "cultural package" of values associated with Western popular culture. Facilitated by ICTs, media culture can sometimes conflict with more traditional concepts of how youth should behave.
In urban centers, media culture and its predominant messages permeate almost all aspects of young people's lives. Increasingly, access to ICTs influences youth's education, personal relationships, employment opportunities, and more. The culture "industry", referring to the entirety of the media and ICTs, is a powerful tool through which young people can access information about SRH. With such information, they can exercise their sexual and reproductive rights and make better-informed decisions about their lives. Thus, ICTs should be available to all and should offer accurate information.
Information Communication Technology (IEC): Present Situation
In the UNFPA Evaluation Report (1999), the following observations were made
• IEC strategies focus too much on imparting knowledge (cognitive approach) and not on bringing about behaviour changes;
• They also miss target audiences because of lack of specification or by being too general IEC projects, underestimating and misunderstanding specific women’s, men’s and young people’s life issues and over-emphasizing individualistic rather than community models;
• Available research on sexual behaviours (major aspects and underlying value systems) is either absent or misused;
• Information based communication procedures are unidirectional and artificially didactic;
• Media programmes or articles are not related to available services and other IEC activities;
• Traditional media are not well identified and poorly used;
• There is some confusion between increasing knowledge and inducing change in behaviour; the latter would require encouragement and an emotional approach.

Thus, further effort is necessary in order to build culturally appropriate prototype educational material, and new information and communication channels using an inter-sector approach. This would require the cooperation of other local stakeholders, whether institutions or NGOs, at the international, national and local/cultural level, possibly along the lines of UNAIDS’ Communication Framework on HIV/AIDS.

Information (mass media)
The mass media have a significant role in creating and sustaining public opinion and the political will to deal with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The media can expose certain trends and phenomena in the community or society that facilitate the spread of HIV/AIDS and inform the public about them. They can also play a central role in educating the public about the importance of preventive measures and serve to point out threats. They can help create public awareness and mobilize public opinion against trends, phenomena and practices, which favour the spread of the epidemic. Active involvement of media organizations and communication practitioners in the effort to deal with HIV/AIDS is critical, if knowledge and awareness are to be increased and risk behaviour reduced among different population segments in African countries.

Important groups like young people are not reached by media prevention messages due to multiple factors, such as political barriers and the fear of a possible repressive attitude from authorities. Communities in remote areas and/or speaking minority languages are also difficult to reach by the established media channels.
Moreover, in many cases, the message is inefficient in its form and content, because it is not adapted to the specific cultural context.
The major factors, which contribute to the inefficiency of the mass media, are:
1) The ignorance and relative indifference of the “gatekeepers” in the media to HIV/AIDS issues. Editors and managers in media institutions decide which stories are to be published/broadcast or not. News selection depends on their choice;
2) The inability of media practitioners to conduct investigative reporting on HIV/AIDS.
3.) More often than not the language and content of the message does not suit the target group it intends to change their behaviour.
Beyond these limited achievements, more complex shortcomings have been encountered in IEC projects. The lack of understanding with respect to the medical or informative content of the message, as well as the subsequent behaviour involved. For instance, in in our communities, media messages broadcast to the rural, urban, uneducated or poor populations have not been understood. Instead they have conveyed or reinforced irrational fears and provoked rejection from possibly infected or sick people, resulting in a fatalist attitude concerning prevention and self-protection. Many tribal populations are so scared by images broadcast on television and showing the physical degradation of people with AIDS, that they refused to hear any more about the disease. Thus, information on prevention and care action is being made much more complicated and, in some cases, impossible.
Preventive education
School education achievements
From UNESCO’s experience, education, and more specifically at school and university, is a key instrument in prevention. Specific information courses are being developed in many countries, as an integral part of the school curriculum on topics such as: life skills, the mutual respect and understanding of women and men and peer education. Practical information about body physiology, sexual education and the importance of protection (i.e. condoms) is also taught. This effort needs to be reinforced and adapted in our communities as well as widened and made accessible to all school-age children within the context of basic learning, using well adapted methods and contents, in other words, culturally-appropriate education for all.
1. Education principles; A continuing life-skills and HIV/AIDS education programme must be implemented at all schools and institutions for all learners, students, educators
and other staff members. Measures must also be implemented at hostels.
2. Age-appropriate education on HIV/AIDS; It must form a part of the curriculum for all learners and students, and should be integrated in the life-skills education programme for pre-primary, primary and secondary school learners. This should include the following:
a.) Providing information on HIV/AIDS and developing the life skills necessary for prevention;
b.) Inculcating basic first-aid principles from an early age, including how to deal with the necessary safety precautions when bleeding;
c.) Emphasizing the role of drugs, sexual abuse and violence, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the transmission of HIV and empowering learners to deal with these situations;
d.) Encouraging learners and students to make use of health care, counseling and support services (including services related to reproductive health care and the prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases) offered by community service organizations and other institutions;
e.) Teaching learners and students how to behave towards persons with HIV/AIDS, raising awareness on prejudice and stereotypes surrounding HIV/AIDS;
f.) Cultivating an enabling environment and a culture of non-discrimination towards persons with HIV/AIDS, and
g.) Providing information on appropriate prevention and avoidance measures, including abstinence from sexual intercourse and immorality, the use of condoms, faithfulness to one's partner, obtaining prompt medical treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis, avoiding traumatic contact with blood, and the application of universal precautions.
3. Education and information; Education and information regarding HIV/AIDS must be given in an accurate and scientific manner using comprehensible language and terminology.
4. School, education and parents; Parents of learners and students must be informed about all life-skills and HIV/AIDS education offered at schools and institutions, the learning content and methodology to be used, as well as values that will be imparted. They should be invited to participate in parental guidance sessions and should be made aware of their role as sexuality educators and importers of values at home.
5. Educators, pupils and students; Educators may not have sexual relations with learners or students and, should this happen; the matter has to be handled with all manner seriousness
6. Infection and teaching activity; If learners, students or educators are infected with HIV, they should be informed

7. Duties and responsibilities; All learners, students and educators should respect the rights of other learners, students and educators. The Code of Conduct adopted for learners at a school or for students at an institution should include provisions regarding the unacceptability of behaviour that may create the risk of HIV transmission. The ultimate responsibility for a learner's or a student's behaviour rests with his or her parents. Parents of all learners and students:
- Are expected to require learners or students to observe all rules aimed at preventing behaviour which may create a risk of HIV transmission;
- Are encouraged to take an active interest in acquiring any information or knowledge on HIV/AIDS supplied by the school or institution, and to attend meetings convened for them by the governing body or council.

It is recommended that a learner, student or educator with HIV/AIDS (and his or her parent, in the case of learners or students) should consult medical opinion to assess whether the learner, student or educator, owing to his or her condition or conduct, poses a medically recognized, significant health risk to others. If such a risk is established, the principal of the school or institution should be informed. The principal of the school or institution must take the necessary steps to ensure the health and safety of the other learners, students, educators and other staff members. Educators have a particular duty to ensure that the rights and dignity of all learners, students and educators are respected and protected.
THE CULTURAL APPROACH TO BEHAVIOUR CHANGE INTERVENTION TECHNIQUE
Focusing on Economic and Sexuality Issues
Research indicates that the sexual behaviors that put young people at risk for HIV/AIDS and unwanted pregnancy are often tied to what teens see in their future. Those visions are often linked to economic realities in their lives. Therefore, society and people working to effect behavioural change among youths should pay particular attention to topics related to economics and sexuality that include:
· the young people's and the family's level of acculturation;
· economic status and opportunities for their families;
· whether teenage sexual activity and parenthood is common and what your young people think about these issues;
· the availability of low- or no-cost contraception, including condoms;
· the availability of community resources for medical, housing and other assistance for people with HIV infection and AIDS
Advocacy for Youth (2004) notes that as the HIV/AIDS epidemic moves into its second decade, it is hitting particularly hard on young people in poor communities. Young African experience higher rates of unemployment, poor housing, poor health, early death and inadequate medical insurance than others. Many would argue that the greatest problems facing many African youth and are economic. In order to fight the AIDS epidemic, we have to fight the evils of poverty.
Culturally, the best way to deal with poverty is going back to the communal/extended family system. This appears to be the major option in the face of worsening global economy. Depending on the government to provide all including employment for its ever-growing population may be disappointing. It is rooted in our culture for the rich members of the extended family to care and assist the poor ones especially the young ones. Unfortunately the modern trend urbanization and globalization appears to have eroded this practice. Selfishness has overtaken the brotherly care and support for the week members of the family.
One of the major roles of the family is psychological and economic backup. In the time past, enlarge family membership was of economic advantage owing to the system of farming and trading. Contemporarily, it is advisable for the old practice of bearing many children to be changed vis-à-vis the unfavorable global economic situation that affect the poor the more. People should bear less number of children as they would be able to train to the optimum levels where the would be beneficial to the family and society at large rather than becoming burden to them.
Traditional Family Values And HIV/AIDS
Family education, in general, exerts an indispensable influence on youth behaviour. However, HIV/AIDS is very rarely discussed between parents and children, in so far as sex issues are considered “taboo”. Generally, this subject is tackled with friends, school acquaintances or partners. According to some authors, parents avoid this issue, because they believe it encourages the early practice of sex. As regards family patterns, the idea of the family in Nigeria is very complex, due to the diversity of patterns of family organization. The idea of family brought from European countries does not fit with the local reality, since it is narrowly related to the socio-cultural context of each group, community or society. “The traditional idea of family encompasses criteria of blood, marriage links and sometimes housing. Family is the space where children get along with their siblings, where community norms and values are transmitted and social control is exercised”. (Locoh, 1988). Therefore, the family may exert control over sexuality. Likewise, kinship systems may influence sexual behaviour. For example, in a matrilineal system, male sexual dominance is weaker because of women’s control over domestic production. Thus, this system contributes to the autonomy and even independence of women. Concerning the structure of the household, the control over sexuality would be more severe in the extended families in which, unlike nuclear families, several generations live together.
The loss of traditional values regarding sexuality is another critical factor in HIV/AIDS prevention and care. Many traditional societies have suffered severe changes as part of the “modernization” process. These transformations have led to the loss of some traditional cultural norms and values that once influenced individual sexual behaviours. Urbanization and formal education moved individuals away from their groups. Then decisions regarding sex became an individual issue rather than a family or community subject.

SENSITIZATION/MOBILIZATION
Mobilizing people is an indispensable condition for the success of culturally-appropriate preventive action. It has to be closely linked to people’s cultures, value systems, and ways of thinking. This is why views on gender, health and disease, sexuality, life and death, beliefs, needs and expectations should be duly understood, assessed and reflected upon in the design of strategies and policies. These will have to be articulated so as to allow for response building at the local levels accordingly.

The most important issue in bringing about change in behaviour is the identification and mobilization of the motivations of a given group. According to observations by high-level medical and IEC specialists, the actual content of messages is not appropriately disseminated and applied. These messages are devised to give people a clear understanding of the origins and manifestations of infection. Unfortunately, though these messages may be learned and “memorized ” from an intellectual standpoint, they are neither appropriated by the given target group, nor integrated into their everyday habits and behaviour. Therefore, understanding the message does not entail an inward conviction, which would make people modify their sexual and non-sexual practices regarding HIV/AIDS. Therefore, cultural references and resources play a more important role in the development of perceptions and attitudes for communities, groups and individuals, than the medical, educational, or institutional approach.
IEC APPROPRIATENESS
IEC will have to be tailored to people’s knowledge, value systems and cultural acceptance.
Efficient IEC will only be secured as a two-way information system, which integrates local values and knowledge with modern medical data and explanation system. These must be phrased and conveyed using the appropriate language (national and local) and semantics of the group in question and not the purely medical, epidemiological and sexological terminology:
a) In matters of mobilization, the role of religious communities, social movements (women, young people, sports associations, etc.), labour, trade and business unions will be essential. They convey their own value systems, and will evaluate HIV/AIDS prevention and care activities according to their own spiritual, ethical and practical mandates and duties;
b) Traditional cultural leaders, more specifically traditional healers may also be consulted to establish links with the modern-type medical and educational system. It is indispensable to consider their role in prevention and care, because many people consult them when afraid of being infected or effectively HIV-positive, not only as medical experts, but also as social and psychological advisers. They play a recognized role in South Africa and Zimbabwe, Western Africa as well as in other types of societies;
c) Individuals: advocating abstinence, monogamy and condom use raises complex practical and moral issues. These will only be accepted if people’s principles, sexual culture and real life conditions fit with such practices. The same difficulty arises in the transmission of the infection and disease to a sexual partner (or partners). Notification in this case means breaking taboos, models and losing “prestige”. Moreover, traditional family rules can impose silence on the subject, especially with respect to women and girls;
d) Risk groups, or culturally and socially endangered groups, are susceptible to socio-economic, educational and cultural factors, which interact dramatically with medical and health issues. These groups are endangered by various types of difficulties at the same time, all of them with seriously destabilizing and segregating effects: massive unemployment, poor or absent housing, economic distress, lack of education;
e) In this context, unsafe practices, refusal of the condom use, drug abuse and smuggling, alcoholism, sexual and all forms of violence, prostitution and procuring are all aspects of the emerging sub-cultures, which are linked to mere survival concerns in a world of brutal power and materialistic interest. They may create serious obstacles to HIV/AIDS prevention and care, and subsequently, must also be addressed in order to reach significant results in fighting the epidemic.
APPROPRIATE MESSAGES AND PROCESSES
Major lines of culturally appropriate IEC messages and processes (including the use of local languages and modes of expression) have to be defined and qualified in order to design and implement the following strategies:
• Initiate mass mobilization in institutions, the society, families and individuals;
• Raise public awareness towards behaviour change;
• Develop proximity relations between the prevention and care system and populations;
• Cooperate with the civil society, religious communities and traditional healers;
• Build community-based prevention and care projects;
• Elaborate or adapt training systems for planners, civil servants, the media, school- and non-school educators, social workers and medical staff;
• Support new creativity linked to HIV/AIDS (preventive/informative creative material, literary and artistic initiatives) improve its correlation with sports;
• Give special attention to endangered groups;
• More in depth investigation of the “grew zones”.

Mass Mobilization: From Duty To Consensus
First, a fundamental distinction has to be clearly established between institutional action/reaction and society’s response:
• Through their professional culture, institutional networks and agents play a certain role in interpreting decision-makers’ instructions. To this extent, institutional echelons and their staff are used to implement instructions from above, which they understand and integrate through their training, experience and institutional culture. This includes HIV/AIDS Prevention and Care policies and projects. Thus, a fundamental “rethinking” effort is necessary in order to shift from carrying out plans and instructions in a top-down process to adapting working methods to people’s cultures and life habits. Innovative training/sensitizing methods and curricula have to be developed for professionals working in cultural setting.
•Civil society has recourse to its own cultural references and resources, before modeling its response to the challenge and the institutional pressure to change behaviour. Thus, the response will be built on the basis of group and personal consensus, acceptance, conviction and motivations. More precisely, its cultural references and resources (i.e. knowledge and perceptions, traditions, beliefs, and behaviour norms) will be the foundation of new cultural practices, which will respond to the constrains and evolution of the socio-economic environment.
Therefore, community-based project clusters will have to be built on a fully participatory basis, with local key leaders, informants and families, including the HIV-positive and even sick persons. People will mobilize themselves only if they are reached where they are and on an equal footing.
Cultural motivations and concrete interests
One of the major issues concerning HIV/AIDS prevention and care is frequently people’s lack of motivation to become involved in the battle against HIV/AIDS, which for many is a low priority among what they consider to be their most pressing issues and needs. Their life patterns, spiritual and ethical beliefs, relationship to their past and value systems are more likely to be oriented towards preserving their identity, developing daily survival strategies in extreme poverty and facing all kinds of deadly threats, including diseases they and their close family or community are permanently exposed to. This is why they do not see their day-to-day interest in giving HIV/AIDS prevention and care a high priority. Thus any rethinking process and subsequent attitudes towards behaviour change should emphasize concrete reasons for this shift in their priority systems, in order to preserve or regain their identity, improve their daily life conditions and encourage the respect of human life and basic human rights.
Generally speaking, in daily life experience, a culture’s constituent features remain tacit, or unsaid even in extremely extravert cultures. Thus, certain references or resources become apparent only in certain specific circumstances, such as the challenges brought about by HIV/AIDS.
Ultimately, cultural references and resources may be taken into account in identifying prevention and care choices at the local level by three different approaches:
• Identifying cultural values, translated into questions about relevance or interest, based on the community’s reactions to HIV/AIDS;
• Identifying the societal or cultural relevance of possible alternatives (thus substituting the reductionist cost/benefit approach);
• Implementing a process of negotiation between external intervention and local community.

BUILDING COMMUNITY-BASED RESPONSE
Involving people in the battle against the epidemic is of prime importance. In other words, building an appropriate and sustainable response to HIV/AIDS means that people have to be involved personally: at home, in their neighborhood and at their work place. In order to change their behaviour, people need a supportive environment. Developing partnerships at a local level can improve the effectiveness of their response. Thus, a well-supported mobilization process should result in numerous local initiatives. Sustained behavioural change comes as a result of a shared social reaction and a clear understanding that disease and death are the direct consequences of HIV/AIDS for ones self and one’s family.
Beliefs/Attitudes
To deal with the belief system that obstruct the positive behaviour change, or encourages negative and risk behaviours, communities and people working to effect behaviour change among young people should;
· Be conscious and sensitive to cultural heritage and respects and values different heritages while harmonizing them with the conventional beliefs and discoveries. The negative beliefs that effect people’s reproductive health should be changed, i.e. denial of sexual education to young persons on the belief that it will corrupt them. There is need for a high level advocacy to be paid to traditional and opinion leaders who are very resourceful to influencing the beliefs and practices of the communities. While the cultural heritages are preserved, it is however pertinent harmonize the beliefs and practices with healthy conventional beliefs and practices.
· Be aware of the inherent cultural values and biases and how they may affect perception of conventional beliefs; This is very important to identifying the harmful cultural practices as well as working out modalities to effect changes, bearing in mind they are the primary factors of negative practices and risk behaviours and effort should be made to work out behaviour change.
· Be sensitive to circumstances (personal biases, ethnic identity, political influence, etc.) that may require seeking assistance from a member of the culture when interacting with member of that culture in order to identify the vantage point for dealing with such circumstances.
Highlighting cultural references and resources for behaviour change
Existing culture is not a fossilized code, it responds to new challenges. It changes according to material, environmental and external circumstances as well as evolves according to its own internal logic. In terms of HIV/AIDS, this response will have to question ways of life, traditions and beliefs, value systems, basic human rights. In other words, these various cultural references and resources will have to be reconsidered: encouraged, modified, reinvented or dropped. This choice belongs to the community, not to the development worker. It should take place as a process of self-evaluation. Under no circumstances should field workers attempt to change the culture of a community by depriving it of its greatest asset – its sense of autonomy. Field workers can, however, enhance invention, creativity and criticism from certain groups within a culture, who can help their community in seeing its weaknesses and its potential, so as to be able to build a genuinely local response.
Supporting the behaviour change process
It is also important to rethink which role field workers will play once the community accepts the idea of behaviour change. In this process, more than leaders of the debate, field workers are resource persons whom the community members can draw upon when identifying cultural and societal conditions for change in behaviour. As a general rule, field workers’ support should never interfere with the community’s prerogative in the behaviour change process, including the solidarity movement to be launched or reactivated.
In this perspective, three areas can be distinguished in which field workers and groups working to effect behaviour change can usefully intervene:
• Stimulating debate;
• Mediating conflicts;
• Defining activities.
These should be implemented through various methods.
Time and energy expected from community members
There are very few examples of spontaneous mobilization against HIV/AIDS and they depend heavily on the participation of unpaid volunteers who have many other priorities, and who have to be recruited, trained and motivated. These volunteers are often peasants or labourers who must balance the time they spend volunteering with the time they need to spend in working in order to feed themselves and their families. Sometimes volunteers are unemployed persons whose first priority is to find a job. Paid facilitators sometimes do not understand the priorities and needs of their volunteers. This often leads to unrealistic expectations about what volunteers will do with no other incentive than their awareness of the problem.

Motivation cannot be taken for granted, even with a serious threat like the AIDS pandemic. Most community initiatives, at some time or another, are forced to find new ways of keeping volunteers’ enthusiasm high and helping them continue to identify the problem. But HIV/AIDS initiatives have an additional vulnerability: it is especially hard to maintain motivation when highly valued colleagues who are infected with the virus eventually succumb to it.
Traditional healers: opportunities and limits
• Traditional healers often outnumber doctors by 100 to 1 or more in most African
countries. They provide a large accessible, available, and affordable trained human
resource pool.
• Traditional healers possess many effective treatment methods.
• Traditional healers provide client-centered, personalized health care, which is culturally
appropriate, holistic, and tailored to meet the needs and expectations of the patient.
Traditional healers are culturally close to clients, which facilitates communication about
disease and related social issues. This is especially important in the case of STDs.
• Traditional healers often see their patients in the presence of the other family
members, this gives insight on the traditional healers’ role in promoting social stability
and family counseling.
• When traditional healers engage in harmful practices, there is a public health responsibility to try to change these practices, which is only possible with dialogue and cooperation. Research has shown that traditional healers abstain from dangerous practices when educated about the risk.
• Traditional healers are generally respected health care providers and opinion leaders
in their communities, and thus treat large numbers of people through dialogue and cooperation. Healers have greater credibility than village health workers (who are often their counterparts in village settings), especially with respect to social and spiritual matters.
• Since traditional healers occupy a crucial role in African societies, they are not likely
to disappear soon. They survived even strict colonial legislation forbidding their practice. Even with the rapid socio-cultural changes occurring in many African societies, traditional healers continue to play a crucial role in addressing a variety of psychosocial problems that arise from conflicting expectations of a changing society.
• Numerous studies document traditional healers’ enthusiasm for collaborating with
biomedical health providers and show that their activities are sustainable as they generate their own source of income.
• Since the 1980s, healers have been organizing themselves into traditional healers’ associations, which make it easier to establish collaborative programmes.
• Collaboration seems to improve health delivery in number of ways: increased
knowledge and skills of traditional healers, increased confidence in their practice,
increased openness towards the community within their work, earlier referral to
hospital or health center.

However, points against, or weaknesses of collaboration include:
• The training and licensing of healers is not institutionalized, which makes it difficult to reach and train them regularly in a standardized manner.
• Quality control of healers is difficult in the absence of officially recognized licensing procedures.
• There is no general monitoring of healers’ activities or claims.
• Traditional healers lack detailed anatomical and physiological knowledge.
• Traditional healers may engage in some harmful practice or cause delays in referral to biomedical facilities.
• Promotion and improvement of traditional methods may undermine efforts to increase access to biomedicine.
• Official recognition of traditional medicine gives legitimacy to traditional healers though their treatments and methods are still largely untested.
• Collaboration with traditional healers raises their expectations of greater recognition from government, which they may not be able to give

Expected changes
It is important to recognize that the expected results of the action undertaken cannot be identified as
quickly and precisely as institutions would hope for, except, to some extent. It may be counter-productive to try to predict the results of the action for three major reasons:
• The apparent “disorder” (when compared with administrative models of “order”) of the behaviour
change process (i.e. condom use, stable relations and sexual abstinence) which has been fully
integrated into the culture of community, does not mean that the action has been totally
unsuccessful;
• “Invisible” changes (in mentalities and behaviour underlying rationality) may be more valuable to
the community than the more visible results repeatedly advocated by institutions (infection
decrease, statistical data in general, etc.);
• It should be kept in mind that, especially when considering the HIV/AIDS issue, the process of
change may require much more time than could be initially predicted (the time needed for the
cultural integration of prevention and care action is essentially unquantifiable: interactive
consensus, collective will and responsibility, etc.).
At the same time, it may be necessary to explain to the community the possible unforeseen effects of the action undertaken, so that they may assess it in their own terms

CONCLUSIONS
a) Though there is worldwide awareness of the danger, it is not enough to motivate people to adopt significant changes in their sexual and non-sexual behaviour with respect to prevention and care. This is due to non-medical or health-related factors, which must be better understood and integrated into new strategies. Moreover, information methods are often unsuited to the understanding capacity of a given population.
b) HIV/AIDS is in permanent interaction with people’s cultures and overall socio-economic development.
c) These interactions, as any two-way process, develop situations and obstacles, which prevent medical and informative action from being fully effective. These can be summarized as follows:
• economic and social development issues heavily influence the spread of the epidemic, in so far as they seriously affect people’s life conditions;
• socio-economic evolution also seriously impacts on societal/cultural previous value systems and life models, especially in developing countries, mainly through population movements, migrations, miserable housing and living conditions, thus aggravating infection risks;
• HIV/AIDS in turn develops important economic, social/societal and cultural effects.
d) Thus, reliable prevention and care IEC has to consider the relationship between cultural references and resources, and socio-economic development issues.

SUMMARY
The ways and means for bui