Field Placement (Agency 1): Uganda Youth Development League (UYDEL)
Field Placement (Agency 2): Association of Uganda Women Medical Doctors (AUWMD) -- Adolescent Friendly Health Education Project (AFRHEP)
Location: Kampala, Uganda, East Africa
Preceptor: Dr. Rogers Kasirye (UYDEL) and Dr. Joy Kyazike (AFRHEP)
Student Name: Jennifer Walsh
Year: 2002

My summer internship consisted of four main projects, developed in conjunction with my UYDEL and AFRHEP supervisors.

1) The Street Smart HIV/AIDS Intervention Project was to be conducted in two slum areas of Kampala, one as an intervention area and one as the control area. Our goal (another UCLA student and myself) was to assist UYDEL staff with the necessary preparations for the pilot study, including site selection, developing a feasible and appropriate incentive structure, developing inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study, facilitating the adaptation of the enrollment survey, and identifying possible staff for conducting the research. Although UYDEL staff was very adept at program implementation, they were unfamiliar with conducting research-based interventions. Thus, setting up the pilot study necessitated that we provide basic research methods training for UYDEL staff in order to build their research capacity and facilitate their understanding of the importance of following study protocol.

2) The qualitative evaluation of AFRHEP's outreach component involved attending multiple IEC sessions about sex and contraception provided by Peer Providers and Peer Coordinators in local schools, depots, and other meeting places of adolescents in the Kawempe slum area and other surrounding slum areas. The evaluation was informal, and consisted mostly of onsite observation at 10 IEC sessions, unstructured interviews with students who had attended an IEC session, semi-structured interviews with peer educators and peer providers, and observation of the monthly refresher training for peer educators.

3) Although many services exist in Kampala for victims of violence and abuse, there is no comprehensive written listing of these resources and I was asked to develop such a tool for use in the AFRHEP clinic, as well as other AUWMD clinics, and also for use by UYDEL and other agencies working with adolescents. This involved locating and visiting local agencies in order to ascertain the services provided and detail these services in a succinct referral sheet.

4) Finally, AUWMD was preparing to host a training for adolescent-service providers in Kampala (in conjunction with the Pacific Institute for Women's Health), and asked me to perform a training needs assessment in order to identify key areas to be addressed by training, and to select the agencies most in need of training. Using a 4-page questionnaire, I was able to identify and interview 18 agencies in Kampala that work with adolescents, and provide recommendations about the training needs of these organizations.

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