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Published 14 years ago
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Expansion of HIV Prevention, Counseling, Psychosocial Support and Outreach Service

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Summary

Since 2004, Pathfinder International has worked to support HIV-positive antenatal women, new mothers, and people living with HIV and AIDS in Botswana. 

Based on the result of a five-year project, a second five-year award from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was provided to continue HIV prevention, counseling, psychosocial support, and outreach services in Botswana. This project is building on the first by expanding existing services and scaling up interventions to reach new areas. The project is being implemented in collaboration with experienced local partner non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and in coordination with stakeholders such as the Ministry of Health.

The first CDC-funded project (2004-2009) was developed to address the many challenges associated with the prevention of mother-to-child-transmission of HIV and AIDS in Botswana. Specifically, the project sought to improve male involvement, increase the number of newborns tested for HIV, encourage people to disclose their HIV status, and challenge tradition beliefs that hinder safe infant feeding.

By the end of year five, 78 government health facilities were providing peer-mother counseling programs to pregnant women and new mothers, and 12,211 HIV-positive mothers were registered with the peer-mother counseling program. These clients were provided psychosocial support and counseling services on safer sex, feeding options, reduction of unplanned pregnancies, stigma reduction, baby testing, partner testing, and adherence to preventative mother-to-child-transmission and antiretroviral (ARV) protocols.      

Throughout the project male involvement has been encouraged. Assistance was provided to local NGOs with the development of ‘Male Groups’ designed to promote male-volunteerism and male peer-education sessions. A rapid assessment done in February 2010 indicated that since the close of the programme, men are more aware of the risks of casual sex and multiple concurrent partnerships, are more focused on gender-related issues, and are less likely to engage in sexual violence.

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Source

Pathfinder International Programs website, January 14 2012.

Comments

Submitted by jturner277 on Tue, 01/15/2013 - 19:50 Permalink

The concept of HIV cases are found common around the world, still yet medical experts are unable to found perfect solution of this diseases, therefore experts are believe that people suffered from HIV positive issues are run towards death so they used to designed various programs to make aware people about the horrible condition of HIV positive which may lead towards AIDS.

Basically in African countries where HIV cases are more often common as compare to other regions and countries so therefore a number of NGO (non government organization) and Ministry of Health also introduce many programs to prevent HIV positive and support the victims with fair services.

 

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