SAfAIDS Skills Building Session at IAC - Women's HIV/AIDS Treatment Literacy Toolkit
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Southern Africa HIV/AIDS Information Dissemination Service Skills Building Session on the SAfAIDS " Women's HIV/AIDS Treatment Literacy Toolkit for Communities"
XVI International AIDS Conference (IAC), Toronto, Canada, 13th - 18th
August 2006
Press Release
The Southern Africa HIV/AIDS Information Dissemination Service (SAfAIDS) conducted the English version of the Skills Building Session on the SAfAIDS Womens HIV/AIDS Treatment Literacy Toolkit for Communities" on 15 August 2006, at the XVI International AIDS Conference (IAC) in Toronto, Canada. The second session, which will be in Shona (an African vernacular language), will be conducted on 17 August 2006.
The Skills Building Session, entitled "Promoting Women's Treatment Literacy As A Scale Up Strategy For Universal Access" equipped and empowered participants to be better advocates in the area of women's treatment issues, as a response to gender neutral and insensitive HIV/AIDS treatment initiatives currently prevailing in the majority of communities of practice across southern Africa and other low income regions. The Skills Building Session served as a platform for harmonising the uniqueness of the SAfAIDS Toolkit participants' country specific efforts, experiences and innovations.
This was realised through providing participants with relevant and adequate knowledge, materials and urgings that they can utilise to educate and empower others in their families, religious circles, workplace, social and peer groups; as well as mobilising communities to influence decision-makers towards protecting and promoting the HIV/AIDS treatment related rights of women in their constituents. It was an inspirational platform for participants to facilitate empowerment of women in treatment issues, upon return to their constituencies.
Facilitator's of the session shared: "With the IAC theme being "Time to Deliver" SAfAIDS has recognised the gross gaps in addressing women's specific needs in the treatment continuum, and we are delivering".
In 2005, SAfAIDS in partnership with the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) and ActionAid International proudly launched the Women's HIV & AIDS Treatment Literacy Toolkit, which was received with tremendous enthusiasm at the 10th AWID International Forum on Women's Rights and Development in Thailand (October 2005), as well as its Africa launch at the 14th International Conference on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Illnesses (STIs) in Nigeria (December 2005).
The "Women's Treatment Literacy Toolkit for Communities" offers practical information on antiretroviral treatment to women, girls and those supporting them. It is currently available in English, Shona and Ndebele and awaits printing in Portuguese and French. SAfAIDS has recognized that rolling out antiretroviral therapy is not about availing antiretroviral drugs but a complex exercise whose planning should adequately address special treatment concerns of girls and women. They include adherence, women-specific opportunistic infections, effects of treatment their biological (physical and emotional) lifecycle and reproductive and sexual health and choices, post-exposure prophylaxis in view of rampant gender-based violence and PMTCT Plus programmes
The toolkit is now in roll-out phase and shall empower women in communities with accurate and relevant information to enable them to make informed decisions in terms of accessing and demanding their rights to full participation in antiretroviral treatment programmes. The roll-out shall further fortify women's coping mechanisms in adhering to antiretroviral treatment (ART), and their ability to support their counterparts within the same continuum of care; and build capacity in communities to effectively utilize the various components of the Women's Treatment Literacy Toolkit. These efforts would fortify women's ART coping mechanisms, sustain their support networks across the care-scale, and promote the crucial principle of Meaningful Involvement of Women Affected /Infected by HIV/AIDS (MIWA).
The roll-out activity generated the following comments from users, which reinforced the demand-need ratio it is serving at community level:
"At my ARV access point I have tried stress to other women the importance of adherence, but I am usually talking from my head, and the other women do not take me seriously. But now the toolkit speaks for itself and gives me the confidence to demonstrate what I preached, especially using the adherence calendar" - woman living positively from Uthano community, Zimbabwe
Rouzeh Eghtessadi, primary facilitator for the Skills Building Session, highlights that "Reversing the feminisation of the current AIDS epidemic will become a reality only when we design & execute responses that are feminised in themselves - we can no longer afford to remove our gender lenses. The status of women - particularly African women - must be engraved on all Treatment Agendas, if we sincerely expect to savour the glimmerings of Universal Access."
SAfAIDS reiterates that only when women's practical and strategic needs are recognised fully, will the Millennium Development Goals and the Universal Access targets be achieved in a sustainable manner.
Sent in by:
Santi Imbers
Email: mailto:santi@safaids.org.zw