In the past one month I remained very busy with GYCA activities. I had to conduct orientation on HIV and entrepreneurship in schools and also I had to conduct orientation on rehabilitation centers on entrepreneurship. On last one month I was able to reach six more schools and provided orientation to the students of grade 8 and 9 about drugs, HIV and entrepreneurship. The one day orientation programs in schools were divided in two sessions; the first half of the programme comprised of the general introduction of HIV, general introduction of drug abuse, the cycle of drug abuse, how to say no to drugs and consequences of drug abuse. The main objective of this first session was to provide as much knowledge as possible to the students about HIV and drugs so that they always remain far from drugs and other high risk behaviors. Similarly on second half of the orientation programe we provided orientation to the students about what entrepreneurship actually mean, what are the characteristics of a successful entrepreneur and how to be an entrepreneur. For conducting orientation on drugs and HIV I was accompanied by a friend of mine who is a recovering drug user himself and has been working in a HIV/AIDS project since last ten years. Similarly another activity of this project was to provide orientation about entrepreneurship to the recovering drug users receiving treatment in rehabilitation centers. The main objective of this orientation was to help drug users to become an entrepreneur after completing their drug treatment. If the drug users become entrepreneur it will automatically keep them away from drugs and makes their recovery strong. In last one month, we reached three rehabilitation centers. We gave presentation to the recovering drug users receiving treatment in the centers about; what entrepreneurship is, what it actually mean, characteristics of a successful entrepreneur and how can we become an entrepreneur. We had very nice discussions with the recovering drug users. It was surprising to listen to some of the drug users past experience that though they wanted to start their own small scale business their own family didn’t support them because the family won’t believe on them. Also it was surprising to know that some even started to take drugs because of failure in their business. The orientation on rehabilitation centers was very useful for us as well. We also got to learn a lot from the experiences of recovering drug users.


The main difficulty we faced in past one month was arranging time with schools and the rehabilitation centers. The schools had their final exams within a week so we had much difficulty in getting time from them but despite the problem some schools arranged time on our request and we conducted the activities on those schools. Also due to the problem of load shedding we had problem in slide show. However despite all these problems the program was a great success. And we had been successful in explaining to our beneficiaries about the risk of drug use and HIV and role of entrepreneurship.