PRETORIA - Combating HIV/AIDS in a South African community
So far, 13.7 million Africans have died. In South Africa alone, one out of every nine people is infected. In the year 2010, more than 600,000 South Africans will die, and by that time one million children under 15 will be orphaned.
“It is an absolute crisis, a catastrophe,” says Johan Strydom, human resources manager of Ford Motor Company, South Africa. “It is a war against the people - the biggest ever. It is a war in which the enemy is invisible.”
The enemy is HIV/AIDS. And it’s attacking South Africa with a virulence that threatens to overwhelm all efforts to combat it. “The rates of infection are so enormous and the need so frightening, we need to prove that something can be done,” says Penny Learmonth, AIDS coordinator, Pretoria Child & Family Care Society in Mamelodi, Pretoria. “If we can make an impact in just one community, we will make a start in controlling this devastating disease.”
Mamelodi is a mostly black, mostly poor community of 1.2 million people, adjacent to a large Ford Assembly plant in Silverton. In 1999, Ford became interested in helping to protect the community from the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS, and company officials approached the CDC Foundation about initiating a pilot project. Soon a partnership was formed between Ford South Africa, the CDC Foundation, CDC, and the Pretoria Child & Family Care Society. The project strikes back at AIDS with a combination of immediate and long-term strategies: providing counseling for people living with AIDS; teaching skills that help unemployable patients support their families; supplying nutritional meals, warm clothing, and bedding; educating people in methods of self-care and prevention; and facilitating basic health care and ongoing monitoring services in liaison with Mamelodi-based hospitals and clinics and Ford South Africa health care service providers. The program also provides care for AIDS orphans and “orphans-to-be.”
“The CDC Foundation has been essential in defining what we need to do, bringing the players together, helping develop the project, and then supporting us through it,” says Learmonth. “To have partners such as the Foundation, CDC, and Ford is fantastic. It makes an enormous difference to a small organization struggling with a huge problem.”
Victor Barnes, deputy director, CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, Intervention, Research and Support, notes that the Mamelodi program could become a model for other countries where Ford does business and for other corporations with operations in South Africa.
“Never before has a major, multi-national corporation come together with three major trade unions in South Africa and agreed that something must be done about AIDS - yet the program is not limited to families of Ford employees,” says Barnes. “Its intent is to reach the entire community from which the workers are drawn. The partnership between CDC, the Pretoria Child & Family Care Society, and Ford South Africa is a first that has international implications.”
Says Learmonth, “This program is itself a message of hope: That people can live with AIDS…that families can survive…that there is a future…and that, together, we can deal with this horrible plague.”