Health Care for 100 HIV+ children in Zambia

Challenge

Over 1 million children have been orphaned in Zambia - most of them due to AIDS. Since 41% of the population lives in extreme poverty, it is hard for families to care for its orphans. Many orphaned children live in grandmother or child headed households. Most grandmothers have never been to school and have few marketable skills. This program equips grandmas/families with the right tools (via education and training), so that they can take care of their HIV+ children and become more self-reliant.

Solution

This program provides food, medicines, and a package of life saving health care services to 100 HIV+ children and training in HIV care and prevention to family members. The package includes health checkups, psycho social counseling, education on prevention of HIV, and training and monitoring in adherence to medication. The high quality continuous care provided leads to an improvement in the children's health so that they can be back in school and has a long term sustained impact on the community

Long-Term Impact

We see an improvement in the health of children measured by higher weight, less malnutrition, improved CD4 counts, improvement in school attendance, increase in the number of women going in for voluntary counseling and testing, and better knowledge of HIV prevention and care. As more people people get tested, and start ARV medication it leads to prevention and spread of HIV, and reduced stigma associated with this disease. Better knowledge of HIV leads to a stronger more self-reliant community.

Additional Documentation

This project has provided additional documentation in a XLSX file (projdoc.xlsx).

Resources