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Mpilo-Lwazi Health Initiative
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We target orphaned and vulnerable children and provide them with desperately needed health services. |
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In 2000, in response to the devastation caused by HIV/AIDS, Ubuntu launched the Mpilo-Lwazi (Health-Knowledge) Initiative, a comprehensive community health programme that empowers at-risk children and youth to confront HIV/AIDS openly and develop the knowledge, skills and resources to secure healthy lives. The overall strategy for the Mpilo-Lwazi Health Initiative is to ensure that every vulnerable member within our communities has access to information, resources, services and tools that will empower them to obtain positive health. Vulnerable community members are those that are more susceptible to HIV/AIDS due to poverty, unstable family and living situations, violence, and lack of education. Mpilo-Lwazi addresses these inter-related root causes with an integrated set of components that aim to provide community members with the services and tools they need to arm themselves against HIV/AIDS and live healthy lives:
- HIV treatment literacy as a member of the regional Steering Committee for ARV Rollout, and in partnership with local health and social service providers. We play an integral role in increasing the uptake of and adherence of life-saving HIV treatment, while building the capacity of local clinics.
- School-based health education through bi-weekly life skills classes for 24,000 learners in 24 township schools with an emphasis on HIV/AIDS prevention.
- Counselling, case management and referral services for 3,000 children and 600 adult community members per year in crisis due to HIV/AIDS, rape or abuse.
- Community HIV/AIDS outreach to 15,000-25,000 out-of-school youth and adult community members per year.
- Community empowerment workshops on HIV/AIDS for 150 leaders of community-based organizations per year.
- Organic community garden development with three primary schools to provide daily lunch to 1,500 vulnerable learners and increase income generation and food resources for 480 individuals affected by HIV/AIDS.
- Community-wide condom distribution of 1.2 million condoms per year.
- HIV/AIDS awareness events to promote safe sex, encourage community dialogue on HIV/AIDS issues, and reduce stigma are attended by 2,000 people per year.
Our Mpilo-Lwazi health team are young adults from the same township communities whose cultural fluency has enabled them to engage community members on urgent health issues. Community participation is vital to project implementation. We work closely with parents, teachers and administrators who participate in the design, implementation and evaluation of Mpilo-Lwazi. Today, Mpilo-Lwazi is reaching over 40,000 children, youth and their families with direct interventions and saturating the area with community-wide condom distribution and HIV/AIDS awareness events.
Ubuntu is embarking on an urgent effort to scale-up our Mpilo-Lwazi interventions addressing the needs of orphans and vulnerable children. To prevent HIV infection in vulnerable children we are improving our lifeskills education program in township schools to focus more deeply on building skills and promoting positive attitudes. With the advent of free antiretroviral (ARV) therapy in public clinics we can now offer real hope to parents living with HIV to access treatment to enable them to raise their children. We are expanding our outreach and counselling programme to incorporate access to voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) and ARV therapy and develop a comprehensive referral network with local VCT/ARV clinics for family case management for people living with HIV.
Finally, we are increasing the capacity of our community garden program at three schools to provide daily lunch to more learners, and develop a garden in collaboration with a support group of parents living with HIV/AIDS at a local VCT/ARV clinic to provide much needed income and nutritional support. |
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Annual Report 2005