INFLUENCE OF NACA MEDIA CAMPAIGNS ON THE BEHAVIOUR OF AL-HIKMAH UNIVERSITY STUDENTS TOWARDS KNOWING THEIR HIV STATUS

 ABSTRACT

This research work was undertaken to assess the influence of NACA on the behavior of Al-Hikmah University Students towards knowing their HIV Status. This work was intended to achieve the following objectives: to what NACA media campaign is all about and their influence towards Al-Hikmah student, to know the actual behavior of student during the NACA media campaign, to carry out the statistics of response made by the student towards their behavior on knowing their HIV Status and the ones that did not response towards the change. Relevant data were collected from both primary and secondary sources. Questionnaire was the main primary data collected instrument employed while data from various relevant publications constituted the sources of secondary data. Upon the analysis of data, the following conclusions were drawn; that the NACA media made their way out in ensuring that the student knows HIV Status and the possible solutions to prevent them from HIV attack. On the basis of the above findings, it was recommended that any student in Al-Hikmah university must undergo HIV test. Finally, it is the opinion of the researcher that the research was carried out correctly.  

1.1                BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Hiv/ Aids has become the greatest threat to humanity in Nigeria and strategies of mitigating the impacts of epidemic are now being developed. Analyses in the education sector have been slow in bringing to fore the implication of HIV/AIDS to the sector. High rate of HIV/ AIDs infections in most institutions in Nigeria has been recorded, but few published studies of sexual behavior of HIV Prevalence in the universities. Prevalence rate between 15 and 20% among students in the region marked them out as a very high risk group, compare to other sentinel groups, such as commercial sex workers, military recruits, and long distance truck drivers.

Nigeria has the largest population in African continent with an estimated population of over 150 million in 2016 (NPC 2010). According to Nasidi and Harry (2006) after the diagnose of the first case of HIV/ AIDs in 1985 in Lagos and its subsequent report in 1986 at  international Aids conference, the disease has since spread to all part of the country Meanwhile, there is no state in the country that is free of the disease with Nigeria ranked 3^rd in the world in terms of HIV/ AIDS burden after India and South Africa (FMOH, 2004; Akpan, 2007). Though the true number of HIV/ AIDS cases in Nigeria is not known, it is estimated that almost 850,000 adult and children had died of HIV/AIDS by the end of 2001 (Kanki and Adeyi, 2006; Nsidi and Harry, 2006). Based on the HIV Prevalence rate of 2001. Nigeria is estimated to have about 3.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS, 5.8% were found to be between 15 and 49 years (FMOH, 2001). Though the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria rose from 1.8% in 1991to 4.5% in 1996 and subsequently, 5.8% in 2001, it is worthy to note that the prevalence rate has declined within the past few years from 5.8% in 2001 to 5.0% in 2003, 4.4% in 2005 and 3.4% in 2016 (FMOH, 2004;2006, NACA, 2016).

The high prevalence of HIV/ AIDs among young people has cursed the surged of priority intervention activities for both in school and out of school young people (NACA, 2005a). These activities focus on awareness creation, access to information and services, and life skill development for behavioral changes. The sensitization awareness and mobilization activities have concentrated in the cities and towns neglecting Al-Hikmah Students. NACA (2007) listed update of the various sector responses to HIV/AIDS as health sector response, education sector response, the youth response, and the labour sector response. In all these, the agricultural and fisheries were not mentioned. However, it is against this background that the study accessed awareness level and sources of information on HIV/AIDS among Al-Hikmah universities students in preventing HIV/AIDS.

1.2    STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEMS

The problem for this study is to appraise the influence of NACA campaign on the behavior of Al-Hikmah universities student with a view of finding the causes,consequences  for the outbreak of HIV/AIDS.Year after year, Nigerian citizens especially students suffer much from the part of knowing their HIV Status.

In spite of the huge resources already spent by government and non-governmental organization in combating the disease, and the availability of the media and their accessibility by the people in the state, the rate of infection is on the increase instead of decreasing unfortunately. However this study has some important limitations. The cross-sectional design of the study limits its ability to specify the direction of causality between exposure to different AIDS prevention activities and the reported behavioral changes. Also the validity of self-reported sexual behavioral data is problematic.

Since there is a high level of awareness of HIV/AIDS, its transmission and prevention, behavioral changes may be over-reported because most people know what to say or might have decided to give responses that would satisfy the interviewers. Also the data set does not permit us to investigate what was the behavioral pattern of the respondents prior to the study with a view to measuring the difference, which can be attributed to the intervention. It was not possible to control for the noise effect in this analysis. The specification of the model could be faulty because we did not have access to measures of the model.

Lack of qualitative tools to explain an observed discrepancy is another problem in this study. In spite of the limitations, we feel the results are encouraging, at least, suggesting the need for a sustained and consistent AIDS campaigns to influence behavioral changes that will go a long way in reducing the chances of HIV infection.