FHI Partner Helps to Bring Hope to Hard-to-Reach Areas

DECEMBER 2007 — Bumi Bwesu (Our Life) is community-based organization in Kashikishi, a town noted as a center of the fish trade on the shore of Lake Mweru, in a remote, rural region on the border of the DRC. Bumi Bwesu runs a youth centre that advocates for an HIV-free generation of young people, promoting preventive behaviors, encouraging people to go for voluntary counseling and testing, and linking those in need to treatment services at health facilities supported by the Zambia Prevention, Care Treatment Partnership (ZPCT).

With the help of ZPCT, the Bumi Bwesu Youth Center was provided with funds under a community purchase order. This is a simple mechanism designed by ZPCT to fund discrete, resulted-focused, and defined community mobilisation activities, such as door-to-door campaigns, focus group discussions, motivational talks, and drama performances.

These are particularly needed just before World AIDS Day, when many fish traders arrive in the town from different parts of the country and the DRC. Most of these traders are single men; many have multiple partners, and their presence attracts a large number of commercial sex workers. As Bumi Bwesu Youth Center Director Alex Kunda Chabu put it, "Celebrations for World AIDS Day have come at a right time to support these communities."

During a three-day campaign, the youth center's motivational talks and drama performances reached about 1,200 people with consistent messages on HIV and AIDS and the benefits of counselling and testing and prevention of mother-to-child transmission services. The youth center referred 139 people for counselling and testing— 90 males and 49 females—who all received their results the same day.

People testing positive were referred to a ZPCT-supported health facility in Kashikishi.

ZPCT supports mobile services to increase access to counselling and testing in remote areas and where the distance to a counselling and testing site affects access. The project aims to increase the number of male clients of these services as well as reach people before they are ill.

In all five provinces where the project works— Central, Copperbelt, Luapula, Northern and North Western—ZPCT continues to create demand and increase uptake of HIV/AIDS services, particularly counseling and testing and prevention of mother-to-child transmission.

PHOTO: A couple is counselled and tested at Kawama Market in Kabwe on Nov. 28, 2007. ZPCT is working to increase access to these services in rural areas.