Pozitive Jump is an HIV prevention project drawing on sports-oriented, interpersonal, experiential learning activities to educate and empower Romanian women to protect themselves against HIV by developing/improving/reinforcing their:

• life-saving skills - concrete ways to decrease vulnerability and avoid getting infected
• interpersonal skills - communication, trust, collaboration, shared leadership, conflict resolution, goal setting, decision making, negotiation
• intrapersonal skills - confidence, risk assessment, self-esteem, a healthy sense of responsibility for one's own life.

In short, the strategy involves combining 'education through challenge' and 'peer education' in order to mobilise women to protect themselves against HIV. Pozitive Jump seeks to cultivate a balance between the actual structure and exercises of the rope climbing experience with debriefings and discussions about HIV prevention. The idea is that it is through experience that one learns and connects with one's deepest values; organisers believe that information about HIV/AIDS and perceived severity does not necessary lead to the long-term adoption of healthy behaviour.

Concretely, the challenge course is a network of elements - cables, poles and ropes - that people use in order to accomplish some individual or group task/objective (e.g., climb to the top of a wall or cross a ravine). A series of activities - icebreakers, followed by warm-ups and then exercises involving a range of physical and emotional challenges - are carried out to meet HIV prevention objectives while unlocking participants' learning potential and allowing them to discover their full capacity. Throughout this process, young women are provided with the opportunity to engage in exploration, analysis, and debate about facts, myths and misconceptions, feelings related to HIV/AIDS, and the factors that reduce their ability to protect themselves and their peers against HIV/AIDS.

As part of the experience, each participating young woman will be offered the opportunity to see what must be done at the individual level for the achievement of protection against HIV, and then will be challenged to find/adopt/choose a solution that suits her own social and economic context - one that she feels represents her and will be successful for her, long term. In addition, participants will be supported in learning to communicate more effectively about HIV in pairs or groups of peers, in part through fostering a better understanding of how women as a group feel about their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, and ways they can address that vulnerability together.

HIV/AIDS, Women.

Globally, young women are 1.6 times more likely to be living with HIV/ AIDS than young men (Joint report by UNAIDS/ UNFPA/ UNIFEM, 2004). The steepest increases in HIV infections have occurred in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (25% increase, to 1.6 million) and East Asia (UNAIDS/WHO report "AIDS Epidemic Update", 2005). According to the National Reproductive Health Study Report - released by United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Romania in May 2005, more than half (54%) of women of reproductive age in that country believe they are not at risk for contracting HIV.

Pozitive Jump peer educators and trainers see a solid connection between the ropes course and HIV prevention in the following ways:

• Safe as it is, the activity implies calculated risks in the mind of the participants; as adapted, this can be a situation (or simulation) used to explore/talk about the risks calculated (or not) in one's sexual life.
• Depending on the challenges, the course can revive discussion about HIV prevention through links with topics like risk, trust, vulnerability, negotiation, adrenaline, and so on. This process is envisioned as a platform for exploration, communication, learning and self-discovery.
• Successfully completing the challenge can improve self-esteem.

Along the lines of the latter, one expert (James Neill of the Australian National University) cited on the Pozitive Jump blog claims that "A numerous number of research papers state that the overall effects of adventure based education seem to suggest lasting enhancement of coping behaviors and improvement in self esteem" - organisers say that low self-esteem has been connected with inconsistent mobilisation against HIV infection in vulnerable groups, in different international studies. "A particularly impressive strength is that challenge courses seem capable of triggering an ongoing cycle of positive change within participants."