AIR Senior Vice President Cheryl Vince Whitman to Give Opening Remarks at UNAIDS Symposium
Washington, D.C. – Cheryl Vince Whitman, a senior vice president at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), will deliver opening remarks at a UNAIDS Inter-Agency Task Team (IATT) on Education symposium on HIV/AIDS, education and school health and nutrition (SHN) in Washington, D.C., on November 30, 2011. Vince Whitman is an authority on the development, implementation and evaluation of school health and HIV and AIDS programs for the education sector and has been a member of the IATT since its inception in 2002. Her presentation will review historical perspectives, key conceptual frameworks and the linkages between these two bodies of work over the last three decades.
The event, “Can We Be More Effective? Strengthening Linkages Between HIV/AIDS and Education and SHN,” will convene members of the UNAIDS IATT to review, identify and discuss existing practices, opportunities and challenges for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of education sector responses to HIV/AIDS through strengthening their linkages with school health and nutrition.
Symposium objectives for participants include:
- Discovering and exploring the conceptual and practical synergies between HIV/AIDS programming and SHN programming;
- Learning about and sharing experiences of integrating HIV/AIDS-related activities and SHN into education systems;
- Discussing how to measure impacts and outcomes of HIV/AIDS and SHN programming; and
- Discussing how existing policy priorities and frameworks support the integration of HIV/AIDS activities and SHN into education systems.
Whitman is former director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center to Promote Health through Schools and Communities at the Education Development Center (EDC). She is the author of Case Studies in Global School Health Promotion, in which she assesses, through the lens of implementation science, the processes used in 26 countries to move from the concept of the Health Promoting School to policies, programs and tracking measures in place in schools, with detailed case studies for each.
The symposium is sponsored by AIR, Save the Children, FHI360, the Global Partnership for Education (formerly the FTI Secretariat) and the World Bank. The host organizations are members of the UNAIDS IATT on Education. Established in 2002 and convened by UNESCO, the UNAIDS IATT on Education aims at improved and accelerated education responses to HIV and AIDS, through promoting and supporting good practices and through encouraging alignment and harmonization within and across agencies to support global and country-level actions.
The event will take place from 8:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. ET at the FHI 360 Conference Center, 1825 Connecticut Avenue, NW, 8th Floor, Washington, D.C.
About AIR
Established in 1946, with headquarters in Washington, D.C., the American Institutes for Research (AIR) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization that conducts behavioral and social science research and delivers technical assistance both domestically and internationally in the areas of health, education, and workforce productivity. For more information, visit www.air.org.
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