This article was first published in The Big Issue Malawi.
When Barack Obama was last year declared leader of the free world, inexplicable jubilation hovered around the human race, especially on the African continent.
“Symbolic,” “historic,”… were some of the terms used to describe the worldly celebrated victory which brought grins of hope on many people’s faces and instilled a new spirit of optimism.
“Yes we can,” is one of the catchy phrases Obama constantly used on his way to the White House, holding in package convincing ideas to change the state of affairs in America and the world.
Back home Obama’s success coincided with outstanding performance of Malawi in the fight against the global challenge that heads of states and governments have overtime banged heads to fathom out its lasting solution but to no avail.
Malawi finished the year 2008 with tremendous and historic record as the country with the fastest growing HIV/Aids national response program in the world, courtesy of effective systems put in place to fight the pandemic.
Principal Secretary for Nutrition and HIV/Aids Dr. Mary Shawa attributed the standing to numerous strides made in different areas relating to voluntary counseling and testing (VCT), administration of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs and reduction of HIV infection rates in various age groups.
“The HIV/Aids national response program in Malawi is the fastest growing in the world. This is the reason why the Global Health Council decided to hold the 2006 Silver Jubilee and International Candle Light Memorial in Malawi on May 18, 2008,” she said.
She said the foremost achievement for the country is the successful integration of HIV/Aids and nutrition program which she said has made Malawi act as an example for many countries in the world.
“Countries are coming to learn from us. The world believed non-medical people cannot perform HIV/ Aids activities, but Malawi went out of the line to train non-medical people to provide HIV/Aids services.
“Nurses and clinical officers started administering ARVs. A lot more services are provided by people who are non-medical,” said Shawa.
She said the use of non-medical personnel has helped take HIV/Aids services to rural communities where most people are live.
“The placing together of nutrition and HIV/Aids is the most unique thing. Besides, prevention and management of nutrition disorders and HIV/Aids is one of the top priorities in the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS). This is an achievement on the policy front,” stated Shawa.
Mobile services and those provided in community health centres increased the number of people undergoing HIV testing to about three million by 2008 from close to 420,000 in 2004, with over 1.4 million people testing within 2008 alone, according to Shawa. She further said the general survival rate for both HIV positive adults and children has gone up, with 20 percent decrease in adult death rate and survival rate in children pegged at 86 percent.
Shawa identified the community based therapeutic care programme and reduction of serious malnutrition cases as chief factors behind increases in survival rates among adults and children.
“On provision of antiretroviral (ARV ) drugs, in 2004 only about 4,500 people were on ARVs and these were paying for the drugs, but by September 2008, we had more than 200,000 people on ARVs and over 70 percent of them are still alive,” she said.
She added the default rate of Aids patients on ARVs was reduced from 50 percent in 2004 to 10 percent in 2008.
However, Shawa said provision of adequate nutritional support for ARV taking patients remains a big challenge for the country as some patients stop taking the drugs because of lack of food.
“When you stop taking ARVs, the drugs develop resistance which creates problems. Such a person may need to be taken to regime two of ARVs which is expensive. It is better to monitor the majority of the patients on regime one,” she emphasised.
Provision of HIV/Aids information as an integral component in the fight against the pandemic is another area in which Shawa said Malawi has recorded progress with over seven million people reached with HIV/Aids messages as of 2008 compared to only about 660,000 in 2006.
She said over 700 channels including newspapers, television and radio programmes were used to transmit the messages.
“We have also had an increase in provision of Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) services, with more than 500 facilities providing services to over half a million women.
“So you can see that progress from 2004 to 2008 has been steady. HIV prevalence rate has gone down from 14.4 percent in 2004 to 12 percent in 2008,” said Shawa.
Besides, she said the proportion of men paying for sex reduced from 21 percent in 2004 to five percent in 2008 and the number of people with multiple sex partners went down from 33 to 12 percent in the same years.
To hasten progress in the fight against the pandemic, Shawa wished stakeholders put their zeal on community service delivery, saying doing so would help the country work on mountains.
“We need to train community workers to move door-to-door and work with people to give them information about HIV/Aids,” she appealed.
“We also need to reduce infection in young people especially between ages of 15 and 24. Infection is high in girls due to inter-generation sex between old men and young girls.”
At the end of 2008, Minister of Sports and Youth Development Simon Vuwa Kaunda reportedly asked for more involvement of young people in the K5 billion (about £230 million) Aids grant from the Global Fund to improve the quantity, quality and time implementation of Aids programs.
“In terms of quantity, there are set goals such as training 10,000 youth in life skills,” said Kaunda emphasizing the skills should be life changing to bring in the element of quality.
The achievements Malawi made last year in the area of HIV/Aid saw Shawa and her working colleagues in the department of nutrition and HIV/Aids getting remarkable recognition by receiving the Diversity Leadership Awards from Inc Media.
