Peer Education for Peace

The Omani Scouts are working with young people aged 12 to 20 on the peer education project, which aims to:
- Raise young people's awareness about the health problems that they face in society.
- Develop young people's knowledge, skills and attitudes so that they are able to protect themselves from dangers that they face (for example: HIV-AIDS, Drugs, Smoking, Accidents, Violence).
- Raise the capacity of the young people to be able to educate their peers (friends and relatives) about these issues.
- Help the Ministry of Health to combat these problems.

The Scouts are:
- Gathering information on the identified health issues
- Analysing the problems, studying and understanding the causes
- Identifying priorities
- Making a plan and implementing this
- Evaluating the project

This project has been launched for many groups of young people including: Scout and Guide groups, Rover Scout groups, public and private schools, universities and sport clubs. For Scouts and Guides, the project is being implemented through the introduction of health awareness topics in their programme and annual summer camps. These topics have been introduced in many patrol leaders' seminars, and in training courses and workshops for adult leaders.

The next step for the Scouts is to introduce these important health topics, such as reproductive health and recent diseases, into the standard youth programme in Oman and to create new merit badges related to these topics which will enable young people to play a constructive role in protecting others from these dangers. They have already produced a badge for peer education sponsored by the UNICEF office in Mascot and intend to make a badge for designing promotional materials.