Botswana Teen Club

The Club works to provide support, encouragement, and understanding to teens to help mitigate their feelings of isolation and resentment. The Gaborone Teen Club has over 200 teenagers, the majority of whom are between the ages of 13 and 15 years old, as well as 15 health care workers and adult volunteers who regularly participate in each monthly Teen Club event. These health care workers include paediatricians, nurses, nutritionists, social workers, adolescent support officers, psychologists, and administrative staff.

According to the organisers, monthly Teen Club attendance is increasing rapidly, at nearly 10% per month. Teen Club events occur on the last Saturday of every month, and have included large group games, drama sessions, pool parties, safaris, movie nights, arts and crafts, and other diverse activities. They also incorporate educational components into Teen Club events, including topics on HIV education, life skills, college preparation, financial literacy, and goal-setting. Organisers say they strive to give teens the opportunity to normalise their social experiences and to improve their outlook on life.

The project also runs a website to provide information about adolescent HIV and the development of Peer Support Groups (PSGs) for HIV-positive adolescents. Botswana Teen Club's goals are to finalise training and life skills curricula for adolescent HIV care and support, hire full-time staff, establish teen drop-in centres, and decentralise the psychosocial support services offered by Teen Club to additional satellite sites within Botswana, as well as sites in other African countries.

HIV/AIDS, Children, Youth

The Botswana Teen Club is a programme of the Botswana-Baylor Children's Clinic Centre of Excellence (COE), one of more than 7 clinics specialising in paediatic HIV that belong to the Baylor International Paediatric AIDS Initiative (BIPAI). BIPAI was founded by an American physician named Dr. Mark Kline in 1999 to improve the health and lives of HIV-infected children. BIPAI's mission is "to conduct a programme of high quality, high impact, highly ethical pediatric and family HIV/AIDS care and treatment, health professional training and clinical research." In partnership with local governments, BIPAI has built and operates Clinical Centres of Excellence and programmes in Botswana (2003), Uganda (2004), Lesotho (2005), Swaziland (2006), and Malawi (2007) in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in Romania. Three other BIPAI Clinical Centres of Excellence are under construction in Burkina Faso and in Tanzania (Mbeya and Mwanza), and plans are underway to construct yet another in Kenya. For more effective decentralisation, these centres provide treatment and support through 20 satellite clinics. More than 25,000 HIV infected children, adolescents, and young adults receive care in these centres and clinics.

Organisers claim that adolescents are particularly prone to risky social and sexual behaviours, poor medication adherence, and antiretroviral treatment (ARV) treatment failure. Based on age-stratification data collected from a representative sub-section of the Teen Club client population, the average age of the paediatric patients is under 9 years old. It is anticipated that in the next few years, when the 8- to 10-year-olds reach adolescence, the age makeup of patient population will shift dramatically toward the teenage years. According to the organisation, a similar trend is occurring in other sub-Saharan African countries. Organisers contend that, if psychosocial support interventions are not put in place throughout the country in the very near future, these adolescents will be condemned to treatment failure, thereby reversing the great strides Botswana and other African countries have made in combating paediatric HIV.