SPAU ‘World AIDS Day’ Pledge Cards:
HIV/AIDS affects all strata of the population in Uganda and poses a serious threat to the socio-economic life and development of individuals and groups of people alike. Although much has been done to create awareness of HIV/AIDS in Uganda, promoting testing and facilitating care for people living with HIV, a lot still needs to be done to reduce HIV infection further and to mitigate the socio-economic impact of the epidemic at individual, household and community level.
HIV/AIDS is the principle underlying factor for a number of diseases including TB, meningitis, and several other opportunistic infections. Consequently, HIV/AIDS has increased the demand for health care and drugs, exerting immense pressure on scarce resources, which has in turn, reduced accessibility of health care for everyone, but hurt the poor the most.
At least 50% of SPAU’s members are people living with HIV/AIDS. At least 90% of SPAU members come from families that are affected by HIV/AIDS. Single parents -especially women- are also considered at a high risk of catching HIV/AIDS in the communities in which they live. SPAU designs programs for women, men, and young people of all ages; to explore their social needs, to analyse the communication barriers that they face, and to practise different and better ways of addressing their relationships and changing their behaviour, both individually and collectively to mitigate the effects of HIV/AIDS . SPAU also supports communities in remote areas of operation to access direct HIV/AIDS services.
SPAU HIV/AIDS mitigation activities currently being run are:
- Community and Home based care training
- HIV/AIDS awareness exercises such as community workshops and video-shows
- HIV/AIDS counselling
- Linking remote communities to direct HIV/AIDS service providers who provide: mobile-blood testing, counselling and referrals
- Memory Work
SPAU seeks to mainstream HIV/AIDS in its development projects to support single parent families. Mainstreaming HIV/AIDS is the process of analysing how HIV/AIDS impacts on various sectors both currently and in the future, to determine how each sector should respond to HIV/AIDS based on its comparative advantage. Mainstreaming HIV/AIDS is done through spreading AIDS awareness and prevention messages as we implement our service projects, analysing how our projects can increase/reduce the risk of spread of AIDS in the communities we work, and adjusting our implementation methods accordingly.