Transferable confidence.

As participants challenged themselves in new situations such as speaking in front of

crowds, they grew more confident and confident as they repeated the activity. Participants shared how this confidence had further enhanced their academic performance as TSiBA students.

Participant 05 found that even though he was nervous of public speaking, he needed to appear confident and effective in front of students so he forced himself to perform the role. Ultimately he found this was beneficial to him as a student, as he could now use this acquired skill in areas where polished presentation was required:

As I am a business student I do a lot of presentations. So now I am with kids they see me as this experienced person than them. So I've become more confident at speaking in front of them. So that has really helped me grow in my subjects, at school also. (P05)

So the skills we are seeing here, we are going to use for a life time. (P02)

6.3.1.5. Training.

Competence in being effective at peer educator work was strongly endorsed by the participants. And training is seen as a vital tool in this regard: “But now here, what I like about this one, is we go for trainings and then after that we spread the word”. (P06)

Participants explain that as leaders there is a duty to know what you are talking about:

Because, it’s being a pastor. You can't preach about God without knowing what is God, you know. SO you, because we are there as leaders, so we have to know what we are talking about, we can’t just come there and say that, we are going to talk about this and we don’t know even like what is the issue about. (P22)

Because you can’t just go and implement without having a knowledge of what you gonna say. Because those learners can be challenging sometimes. (P06)

A lot of the effectiveness of the peer educators in conveying the programme message was attributed to the quality of training. It was not easy to judge the level of the peer educators work skill, as there were no records kept of trainings attended by each peer educator or indication of any assessment during training.

In addition, participants were vague about trainings they received. The longer attending peer educators spoke with enthusiasm of training they had received from experts, but also wished that such training was more regular and more often.

The newer peer educator reported a variety of training backgrounds from on the job learning to an eclectic description of occasional on campus training days or even no training at all: “There is no training for peer edz. But we just come. We are just given a topic because they expect you to know something that is going around the community”. (P11)

There was a lot of competence frustration experienced by participants who felt inadequately prepared and not able to perform effectively:

But nowadays is like when we go for the implementation on Sat we didn't even make like preparation of what we gonna talk about and things like that. So we do that when we come here early in the morning which is I think is not of a quality to discover everything now and go and implement and teach like learners at the same time. (P09)

The impression given was that this directly impacted on their enjoyment of the PEP experience:

The only thing that I did not enjoy was that we get the topic one day before we teach these student. So to me it does not give us chance to research on the topic much so we just research superficially and then we teach without having much information. (P11)

Participant 22 felt he could not participate fully as he did not feel competent: Like having that more information gives you, confidence, as an individual, like I'm going to present, I know what I'm talking about. But when you come there, without knowing what you are going to talk about, you are also going to pull you back you know. And that the more it pulls you back, you lack confidence. (P22)

That the participants knew that they would benefit from more training for the effectiveness of the programme was apparent:

I always think about is to have a session whereby we can again be trained as a peer educator. To have a training for peer educator. So that we don't just come with our own experiences but we come with experiences of other expert. (P11)

Participant 11’s narrative suggests he is not aware at all of the training sessions set up for the programme:

What I'm suggesting is we could have a training for peer edz. Even if it could be for one day to two days but at least there is a training for peer edz that can help much. (P11)

Participants are acutely aware of the need to present relevant content to the learners: …. we need new materials, cos the topic that we are talking about it is developing every day and there has been new changes. So I think that the information that we have its needs to be updated. (P05)

There is general agreement that research is an important part of the work as a peer educator. Many took the initiative to self-research topics, with “Internet” being the favoured source. In some instances, they also consulted experts, or either the programme co-ordinator or the student counsellor. Sometimes research took the form of visits to topic partner sites:

… we go to places like youth club, like love life, we are wanting to know more about that specific thing so that we can bring it back to that specific learner who was requested the answer. (P06)

Often research followed a learner question that could not be answered during the

implementation, and participants took it on themselves to ensure the learner received an answer: So I told them, "'no I don't know what you are asking. But I will follow up on the research''. So I went to Mama D (the student counsellor), cos she has more experience in the peer education and I asked her, and then I also did my own research. And then I get back to her. Cos I am still friends with some of the learner in a social networks. (P05)