How thumbs are turning the tide on AIDS

How can you confront AIDS with your thumb?

Children from Masbate, in the Philippines came up with an ingeniously simple way of opening up discussions about the disease with their friends and families.

“A Thousand Little Red Thumbs,” is an awareness campaign which starts with children marking their thumbs with red ink. This arouses the interest of their peers who want to know the reason, and opens the door for a discussion of HIV and AIDS.

More and more children have started to sport red thumbs, indicating that they are informed about AIDS issues and ready to talk.

One of the participants described what happened when he arrived at school: “Everyone started to approach us: students and teachers… That gave us the chance to talk to them personally.” 

Others described how children came up to them in the street, and the way they joined in enthusiastically.

The “Little Red Thumbs” campaign has unblocked the barriers of complacency that had stopped the discussion of HIV and AIDS in this community.

It demonstrates the potential of children to:

• act as messengers
• develop messages and approaches that reach both adults and children
• influence policies

Children led the way in explaining how the disease can affect the future for their friends and families.

Children feel empowered to:

• talk openly about important and potentially controversial issues
• take action to help generate change
• reverse the traditional parent-to-child transfer of knowledge
• champion a child-to-parent/adult advocacy against HIV and AIDS

This children’s initiative was a low-cost, curiosity-driven information education campaign using a peer-to-peer and child-to-adult approach that gave immediate results:

• integration of HIV and AIDS topics in the school curriculum
• the marking of World AIDS Day in school
• the inclusion of HIV topics in parents’ seminars