21:20 21.10.2008 | All news from "AIDS/HIV"
Nigeria: Every Community Needs Access to HIV Counseling And Testing - Osotimehin
In an exclusive chat with Good Health Weekly, Director General of the Agency, Prof. Babatunde Osotimehin said plans are at advanced stage to launch the independent body as a Board of Trustees of an organisation that would collect money from well meaning Nigerians and administer the money through the State Action Committees on AIDS (SACAs) to identify the needy children and give them the money.
Said Osotimehin: "We have approval from the office of the Vice President for this to happen and we are expecting that by November, we will inaugurate the Board of Trustees. We think there are many ways an orphan can be supported. The orphan can be adopted from a distance and say that you will be responsible for the education of that orphan."
Explaining, the DG said: "The resource goes into a central pool, and allocated to the beneficiary and there would be a regular report from the central organising system on the orphan. We believe we can get corporate organisations to give money to this and make their lives less harrowing."
There are about 1.3 million orphans currently spread across the country and there is a process on ongoing that is trying to tally and identify where these orphans and see how best to reach them. Osotimehin added that the database will be available for the BOT to do business with.
On NAWOCA, he stated:
What we hope to achieve with NAWOCA is that we believe it would allow women to have a voice. The National Coordinator is the First Lady but we have asked the wives of governors to lead NAWOCA in their States and also to get wives of LG chairmen to lead NAWOCA in their LGAs.
In doing this, there would be some kind of decentralisation and also that each branch would mobilise women to issues around information gathering or sharing on HIV & AIDS, moving women from their homes to antenatal clinics so that they can be tested and registered if there is need for PMTCT service.
"We can also look at it and say since it is women that are going to be most concerned about their children also get them to talk about polio. It is a powerful strategy to enable us talk about women and children.
We have designed capacity building workshops for each State so that each of the States Action Committees for AIDS (SACA) can work with the office of the wife of the governor and we can ensure that the SACA provides the technical issues while wives of governors provide the political issues and they would get resources from SACA to do these things.
If we can mobilise women and children, we would have gone a long way in bringing people to services and ensuring that they get quality of service."
On the latest HIV seroprevalence survey, he said the Federal Ministry of Health was close to completion of the compilarion of results. "We have raised resources internally and externally and it is expected that by December it will be ready.
We did something in 2007 that shows that the prevalence rate is actually going down. The behavioural survey and biological survey, involving blood tests and social norms, give data that shows for example that we now have problems with Men having Sex with Men (MSM) and intravenous drug users. It is not much but has its national relevance. It is an interesting data."http://allafrica.com/