In 1998, a two-week workshop in Addis Ababa was organized by the Eastern and Southern Africa Office of UNICEF to develop curricula for life skills education in the region. Officials from the ministries and departments of education from 10 countries in the region, as well as Nigeria and Ghana, participated, along with resource people from UNICEF, New York and WHO, Geneva. The VIPP method was used to train participants on the basics of life skills curricula development and to map out the main steps that they need to follow with stakeholders in their countries to create successful curricula. The workshop led to concerted follow up action throughout the region. Many life skills programmes in the region had their roots in this event. One of the participants gave a report on her experiences in applying VIPP in South Africa, following the Addis workshop:

Barbara Michel returned to South Africa with a mission. She used VIPP as a participatory and consultative approach, focused on mobilizing HIV and AIDS strategies and interventions within the education system in a way which is atypical in government practice. As a provincial coordinator of the life skills programme (1995–1999), she was involved in targeting the in-service training of teachers within the Department of Education in the implementation of life skills and HIV/AIDS programme for the primary school learner. In 1999, she was appointed as National Coordinator for the Secondary School Life Skills Programme within the Department of Health (DoH). She was responsible for identifying and developing strategic interventions and leadership, involving youth in- an out-of-school, in order to address the worrying rise in youth HIV prevalence. Within this position, peer education was identified as a key strategy. With a range of programmes already in place, and with no attention to standards or understanding of benefits and practice, the DoH supported the idea of a field-generated process to develop guidelines and standards for peer education. The extensive action research assessment and guidelines development involved over 200 individuals in all nine provinces in South Africa. The process took three years to complete with technical assistance from the Harvard School of Public Health. VIPP was used to contribute to the philosophy of utilizing participant experience.

In 2002, Barbara was appointed as the first national co-ordinator for the Higher Education Sector response to HIV and AIDS. The programme was the first effort at managing and mitigating the impact of the epidemic on the sector. VIPP was a valuable approach in shaping strategic plans, priorities and direction, involving an institutional representative from each public institution. Using a VIPP approach helped identify priority areas for training and ensured a broad consultative process in working with Campus Health in the uptake of voluntary counseling and testing, linked to ARV treatment and opportunistic infection care networks.

Barbara found that VIPP has been extremely valuable in her own development in working with people from a range of contexts and levels of experience. For her, VIPP involves principles of adult education; encouraging participatory learning approaches, promoting participatory management and field-generated processes through action research.