Benson Sangano, age 24, lives in Ungwezulu village, Lukhanda VDC (Village Development Committee) with his sister, her husband and 3 other children. Benson first heard about Temwa because of our Early Childhood Development (ECD) project in Bula.
As part of Temwa’s Strengthening Community-Run HIV Services project, Temwa held a football tournament and HIV awareness event in Bula, following on from the success of previous events, including a football competition held in November which attracted an estimated 8,000 community members. This event both promoted education on HIV issues and provided the opportunity for attendees to get tested.
The HIV prevalence rate among adults aged 15 to 49 is 9.6% countrywide. Although Malawi has recorded a significant reduction in new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths; adolescent girls, young women and other key populations, particularly in urban areas like Nhkata Bay North, continue to bear the highest burden of the epidemic
Benson heard about the tournament through an announcement made during one of the team’s training ‘young brothers’, and agreed to join his friend at the event.
“I am happy I attended this tournament because not only have I enjoyed watching the games, but I have also had the chance to test and know my health status.”
Benson also highlighted the importance of the event for encouraging young people who still need to get the chance to go to the hospital to get tested. This is in part due to the distance it takes to walk to the hospital in Bula, where people usually get tested. It’s for this reason that Benson had only managed to test for HIV once before Temwa’s event.
This is common across northern Malawi, where some of the health centres’ catchment populations live as far as 30-45 kilometres away, with little to no transport available. In Nkhata Bay North specifically, the five health centres are all under-resourced as a result of their sparse locations.
This is why awareness events such as these matter so much to the communities we work with, to make HIV testing more accessible while reducing the stigma and increasing interest in HIV testing.
Awareness events have a huge impact on involving wide numbers of participants, but it is also essential to maintain support to health centres and local governance to ensure these systems can maintain accessibility to testing and information in the long term, sustainably and independently.
As part of Temwa’s Strengthening Community-Run HIV Services, we have also implemented a provider-initiated HIV testing and counselling (PITC) across all five local health centres in Nkhata Bay North: an approach that ensures every clinic visitor is automatically offered an HIV test.
These measures allow Temwa to support communities in one-off awareness and testing events while establishing more permanent and sustainable measures for local health centres to continue working to fight the transmission of HIV/AIDs.
Read more about the project here.