governance, citizens and HIV/AIDS
news diaries from Sub-Saharan AfricaMentor mothers
Health-e news reported on the success of the mothers2mothers (m2m) programme, which started in Cape Town in 2001 and is rapidly expanding across Africa, calling it simple in its design and methodology, yet massive in its impact. m2m has ballooned
to 588 sites in seven countries, employing over 1 500 women living with HIV who have in turn enrolled over 300 000 pregnant women onto the m2m programme. Mothers2mothers offers an effective, sustainable model of care that provides education and support for pregnant women and new mothers living with HIV and AIDS. “We take mothers who are living with HIV and have been through the prevention of mother to child transmission programme, we employ, train and educate them to in turn offer education and support for the mothers living with HIV and who come into contact with the health system,” said founder Dr Mitch Besser, who believes that programmes such as m2m could change the world’s perceptions of women in Africa. “Women are an extraordinary resource and they are undervalued,” he said. The programme has expanded from South Africa to Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Swaziland and in 2010 will add Uganda, Tanzania, Namibia and Mozambique.
http://www.health-e.org.za/news/easy_print.php?uid=20032596
Story ideas:
If Mothers2mothers is in your area, visit people involved and do a feature on how it works and the impact it has had on the community. If no one has heard of it, find out how HIV programmes in anteclinics in your area are faring. Is the positive
energy this programme seems to foster evident there and if so, is role modeling such as this happening?
If not, if health care workers in your community seem exhausted with their workload, find out if they have tried to introduce this programme or something similar. Use your media outlet to make people in your community aware of m2m’s expansion in Africa, how it works and who to contact if they would like to use it.
What other positive role-modelling programmes are operating in your community? Ghana has a Models of Hope project, see
Models of Hope, if there’s similar work being done in your area, find an interesting, topical angle to report on their work.
Turning people with disabilities into activists
IRIN/PlusNews did a feature where they interviewed young Mozambicans with
disabilities about what they know about HIV and AIDS and found that most of their
information came from their own observations. HIV prevention campaigns have ignored
the fact that young disabled people are also at risk of infection – a 2007 study
involving people between 11 and 23 years of age with and without disabilities found
that just 10 percent of the disabled respondents knew the difference between the
virus (HIV) and the disease (AIDS), and only four percent knew the symptoms of AIDS.
The Mozambican Association of Youths With Disabilities (AJUDEMO) has been working
with various partners to include people living with disabilities in AIDS initiatives
and turn them into activists. “The activists are trained and given the task of
identifying other handicapped people in their neighbourhoods, and planning
interventions based on their individual needs and capacities,” said AJUDEMO
president, Sergio Reis. Conversations with the intellectually handicapped are kept simple and direct,
sign language interpreters design programmes for the deaf, and the blind are taught
how to handle condoms. The activists also help disabled people overcome structural
barriers at medical centres so that they can access HIV counselling, testing and
treatment.
http://m.irinnews.org/87697.htm
Story ideas:
How well-equipped are people with disabilities in your community to avoid getting
infected with HIV and to access treatment and other help if they are?
Find out if there is an organisation doing similar work to AJUDEMO – including
people with disabilities in AIDS initiatives, keeping conversations with
intellectually disabled people simple and direct, using sign language interpreters,
etc.
Ask people living with disabilities how they would like to be involved in AIDS
initiatives and learning more about HIV. What barriers are there to their inclusion
and how can these be set aside?
Educating teachers on HIV
In Zimbabwe, where aid agencies estimate 120 000 children are HIV-positive, school
teachers are finding themselves increasingly in the frontline of the epidemic. In a
recent report, IPS interviewed a grandmother who said her grandchild’s teacher
“believes she is wasting time by coming to school when it is obvious she will die
before she completes her studies”. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Harare Cluster office has partnered with the ministry
of higher and tertiary education to develop an HIV/AIDS manual for teachers, which
was incorporated into the curriculum at teacher’s training colleges at the start of
the 2010 academic year. The manual will also be distributed to teachers who are
already practicing. Special courses and workshops will also be held for those
teachers already practicing. Noting that the manual could provide the link that has
been missing between parents or guardians and teachers of children living with HIV,
an analyst said the impact teachers have on their students can make a big difference
in the wider community.
http://ipsnews.net/text/news.asp?idnews=49996
Story ideas:
How are teachers in your area kept up to date with HIV/AIDS issues? Talk to teachers
and principals to get a sense of how they see their role in the fight against
HIV/AIDS. Also speak to learners who are HIV-positive and their parents or carers,
asking them if and how they are supported (obviously protecting their privacy if
necessary). Do they think a local manual, such as the Harare UNESCO manual, would be
helpful? Are there any plans to develop one?
Excluded from HIV Response
More than two-thirds of African countries have laws criminalising homosexual acts and, despite accounting for a significant percentage of new infections in many countries, men who have sex with men tend to be left out of the HIV response, IRIN/PlusNews reports. "[They] are going underground; they are hiding themselves and continuing to fuel the epidemic," UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibe told IRIN/PlusNews. The news agency compiled a list of rights violations against gay Africans, including cases from Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi and South Africa. http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=87793 Story ideas: In your country / area, who is working to ensure that gay men and women have the right of access to information about HIV and AIDS as well as care and prevention? Ask them about the difficulties they face in advocating for this vulnerable sector of society. If men who have sex with men are completely left out of the HIV response in your country, find out what the situation is in neighbouring countries and if there are any community initiatives there that could provide valuable lessons.
Stigma and Discrimination – no sign of diminishing
IPS ran a story quoting experts who said that HIV-related stigma and discrimination remain a key concern in southern Africa, despite many HIV-awareness campaigns launched by government and civil society organisations. A woman from a small village on South Africa's West Coast told the reporter that her life has been lonely and difficult since her community found out about her HIV-positive status. She is not well enough to work and has tried to apply for a disability grant but, being semi-literate, has been struggling to fill out the forms. Recently published research by the Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR) at the University of Cape Town confirms that stigma continues to inhibit people from accessing HIV counselling and testing services, including programmes to prevent mother-to-child-transmission, HIV treatment and care. CSSR researcher Brendan Maughan-Brown, who surveyed 1,074 young Capetonians in 2003 and 2006, found that stigma has increased despite public sector c ampaigns and improved treatment and care services. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49904 Story ideas: If stigma is increasing then HIV-awareness campaigns are not doing their job. Ask people who are infected or affected by HIV in the communities you cover if they think this is the case - do they feel there is more stigma and discrimination, less or much the same in the past five years? What do they think of the awareness campaigns they are exposed to? Have they been involved in any / would they like to be / how do they think campaigns could reduce stigma? See if your newspaper / radio station could work with local government structures and involve the community in an HIV-awareness campaign that brings people together.
Models of Hope in Ghana
The Community of Practice for African media practitioners working on HIV/AIDS was recently launched in Livingstone, Zambia by Idasa’s Governance and AIDS Programme. Two of the participants speak in this video clip, about an initiative in Ghana called “Models of Hope” which provides positive role models for people living with HIV. See more here.
Granny’s decade of dancing
A 55-year-old Zimbabwean woman who learnt that she was HIV-positive in 1996 told IRIN about how joining Tsungai ['be strong' in Shona] support group led to her participation in the Murambinda Peer Educators Dance Group. “When I tell people I am a grandmother, they do not believe me because when I dance I have so much energy – there is no old and young when we are fighting HIV!” says Anna Matopodza, who didn’t think she would live to see her children reach adulthood and now has 14 grandchildren.
“Many people died of stress in the 1990s because there was not much information about HIV/AIDS … this is why I am part of Murambinda Dance Group, as old as I am.”
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=86834
Story ideas:
As the year draws to an end and editors look for “lighter” stories, look for someone like Anna, who’s doing good work and having lots of fun at the same time. Dancing and singing lend themselves to great pictures too. If there’s nothing like this happening in your area, you could suggest that someone organises it and make sure that you’re there to write/record/photograph.
Condom message misinterpreted
The number of women presenting with unplanned pregnancies who have switched from pills or injections to condoms in response to messages promoting condoms for HIV prevention is very worrying, Dr Margaret Moss, who heads the Contraceptive and Sexual Health Services at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, writes in the October edition of Continuing Medical Education. “Some HIV-infected women said lay counsellors actively discouraged use of other contraceptives,” she says.
“Whether this is the true counselling message, or merely the client’s interpretation, is open to question. Whatever the case, it is an extremely worrying situation.” Advice should be to use “highly effective contraception, of the client’s choice, to prevent pregnancy, in addition to correct and consistent use of male or female condoms to protect against STI/HIV infection or reinfection,” she says.
Story ideas:
See if you can find out whether this counselling – or misinterpretation – problem in Cape Town exists in your area too. You could get accurate facts from medical authorities, making sure they are in language easy understood by the layperson, and use them in a sidebar to a story about HIV.
Documentary exposes sexual abuse of children
A Bulawayo film maker has exposed the sexual abuse of primary school-age children in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Thandazani Nkomo said he made his documentary, which revealed that more than 100 orphans at a school with
366 pupils have been abused, to prompt the authorities into action.
According to The Standard newspaper, the film forced community leaders and government officials to investigate and they found that 350 of the school’s pupils come from families that share a single room. About 10 people have been jailed for rape and other sexual offences but “some of the children do not report the cases of sexual abuse because they are being abused by people who provide them with accommodation, food and send them to school”, an MP was quoted as saying.
http://www.thestandard.co.zw/local/21915-sexual-abuse-scandal-hits-bulawayo-primary-school.html
Story ideas:
Research shows that Southern Africa’s increasing number of HIV/AIDS orphans drastically increases children’s vulnerability to abuse, particularly in situations of dire poverty. Probe rumours of abuse in situations such as this – Nkomo’s documentary illustrates the power of good investigative journalism to bring change – but be very careful to check your facts.
