Promote Maternal & Sexual Health in N. Uganda

To our friends, benefactors, and supporters:

Apwoyo Matek!

Apwoyo Matek (pronounced uh-foy-oh ma-teck) means "thank you very much” as well as “you’re most welcome” in Acholi, the local language of Northern Uganda. For five weeks, the grassroots onsite work (GROW) team was working in Gulu, Uganda with our partner organization Gulu Women’s Economic Development and Globalization (GWED-G). As we traveled to rural villages and health centers, everyone that we met—from the district chairperson to HIV+ mothers—greeted us with this spirit of warmth and kindness. HIV+ mothers enrolled in the Mama Club expressed gratitude for our mama kit program; the mama kits that we bring each year are donated by Delivering Hope and contain all the items necessary to deliver a baby safely in the absence of a hospital. Women who receive mama kits, we found, are also better equipped to be treated at health centers, where medical supplies are often in short supply. Thanks to our partnership with health center staff, expectant mothers in the Mama Club receive antenatal care and support with living with HIV. Importantly, for those enrolled in the program, the rate of mother-to-child HIV transmission is significantly reduced.

In addition to directly working with HIV+ women and strengthening the capacity of health center staff, our project also empowers village health team members (VHTs) and HIV+ caregivers. VHTs mobilize their community for a variety of health services; caregivers are elder HIV+ women who focus on counseling newly-diagnosed HIV+ women. Both are elected, voluntary positions that we promote by hosting trainings and providing compensation in the form of soap and salt. For many of the HIV+ women that we talked to, a caregiver or VHT was the one who provided the most meaningful source of support and comfort in the midst of community stigmatization.

Based on the feedback that we collected from the community, we hope to improve and expand our project even further. Almost every woman we talked to asked for either seeds to plant crops, goats to generate income, or money for school fees. In the next year, expanding the income-generating component of our project will be our top priority. Our goal is to economically empower 200 HIV+ women by sponsoring four community gardens with seeds and microfinance trainings. And, after the success of our pilot male peer education group in Coke parish, we are excited to officially launch our male role model program. Two men from each village that we work with will be selected and trained on gender-based violence prevention and HIV/AIDS prevention. We will also continue to strengthen the capacity of health workers, VHTs, and caregivers by continuing to host trainings and workshops. Now that the Ugandan Ministry of Health is releasing a new guidebook, we will host a conference on the new set of guidelines in 2016.

Much remains to be done and, to accomplish all of this, we need your help. Thanks to your support we have witnessed a measurable impact in the lives of HIV+ women. Last year, with the help of VHTs, health center staff, and local leaders, 8 gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS awareness sessions were held in 8 parishes of Amuru with more than 300 people attending. Next year, we hope to improve the effectiveness, attendance, and scope of these sessions even more. Visit our page at GlobalGiving and our Wordpress for more information about our project. To learn more about our experience in Uganda, please check out this grassroots change video we made for GWED-G and our GROW 2015 blog. With your continued support, we hope to integrate the needs and stories of the women we met into impactful change.

Hello family, friends, and supporters!

We hope this message finds you enjoying the first few days of spring. We want to thank you all for your support so far this year. So far, 2015 has been great for GlobeMed at Columbia as we have added around 12 new members to our chapter, and strengthened ties between members who have already been with us. As a chapter, we have sent members to our national global health conference in Evanston, Illinois, hosted our bi-annual Gala, and put together many events that both raise awareness about our project and help fundraise for our project on campus. We are thrilled to share recent updates from GWED-G below.

First, we are excited to highlight that GWED-G’s work regarding youth, mama kits, and GlobeMed’s project was featured in the Daily Monitor, a national Ugandan newspaper. Pamela Angwech, GWED-G’s founder and leader, was recently awarded for her work with women’s rights. Additionally, GWED-G, as a leader in movements for gender equality and women’s empowerment, has been involved in a number of collaborations – with several organizations for international women’s day on March 8th, with the French embassy, with the UN, with Mount Sinai in New York, US on their global health curriculum, and with Straight Talk Foundation on developing youth IEC (Information Education and Communication) materials. This outreach and collaboration is very exciting to hear about, as it means that more people than ever are hearing about all that GWED-G does.

As for what GWED-G has been working on specifically, we’d like to relay to you a few important updates. As always, these updates deal with integrating different facets - 146 people were tested for HIV/AIDS through voluntary counseling and testing (VCT), 35 pregnant mothers received antenatal testing, 20 mothers benefitted from family planning outreaches, 18 babies were immunized, and 215 community members were involved in discussions on issues surrounding HIV/AIDS through awareness sensitization campaigns. Following up since our last message, mapping of the beneficiaries for this year has been concluded. More mothers have been included in our project - in Coke, we now have 87 HIV-positive mothers, as is true with two other groups, and our original Palema group has 300- all exceeding our capacity set at 50 mothers per group. While there are limits to the number of mothers we can fully accommodate, we can still overcome those limits through your kind donations. Additionally, we have been reaching out to our secondary beneficiaries through awareness and sensitization campaigns and working to continue education to prevent reinfection for the babies.

A new facet of our project which was recently implemented, the Gender Based Violence initiative, has taken off and we are focusing on bringing awareness of gender based violence to women living with HIV and their spouses, including the youths. This is so crucial not only because in itself, gender based violence is shocking, and deeply harmful, but also because it can have dire consequences in terms of physical, mental, and emotional health. In fact, women who experience gender based violence are three times more likely to have an unwanted pregnancy, HIV, or another sexually transmitted disease than those that do not.

More about our collaboration with Straight Talk Foundation: their trainings are for officers working around reproductive health rights and aim to strengthen audience participation during sensitization sessions. Some suggested methods are to make the participant have room to talk, consistently review current methods of outreach, and expose the participants to new knowledge while they are in groups- to have a two sided conversation. As always, HIV/AIDS is a sensitive issue and it’s not enough to focus solely on one person; it is important to involve the family/relatives as well, which GWED-G does, and to cater towards each respective participant age group.

As you can see, both GWED-G and GlobeMed at Columbia finished 2014 strong! We are grateful for your support in 2015 so far and would like to celebrate the successes we have achieved together. However, we still have a long way to go until the people of northern Uganda fully exercise their right to health. We ask for your contribution to and continued support for GlobeMed at Columbia’s project. Feel free to visit our GlobalGiving page, Wordpress, Tumblr, and Facebook pages or follow us on Twitter.

In solidarity,

GlobeMed at Columbia

Links:

• March Newsletter