Mitigating the Impacts of HIV/AIDS

It is becoming increasingly clear some of the poorest members of communities are those affected by HIV/AIDS. This is due to the fact that it is exceptionally difficult for people affected by AIDS to retain employment or to muster the energy to develop their own income.

Although the effects of the disease are severe, in the majority of cases a combination of the social seclusion imposed on infected people and the belief that their life is over is worse, and contributes to a far more rapid decline in health than the disease would otherwise cause.

Whilst VETAID's Promoting the Rights of People Living with HIV/AIDS project tackles the causes of increased poverty among people living with HIV/AIDS, this project looks at mitigating the physiological and poverty driven impacts of the disease.

The goal of the project is to enhance the quality of life of people living with HIV/AIDS and their families by promoting livestock-based family income generation and food security, and by providing food supplements to those in most need to enable their anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment to be effective. The project will achieve this through:

• Enabling beneficiaries to have a reliable source of cash income from poultry or goat rearing, which will provide for basic family needs, including medicines and school fees.
• Improved family protein consumption, nutrition and health from eggs, milk and meat from their own livestock (which otherwise they could not afford to buy).
• Reducing the stigma and isolation suffered by HIV-infected families, by enabling them to be self-sufficient and productive members of their communities and through the formulation of support groups.
• Enabling those on ARV treatment who cannot afford proper nutrition to have the food necessary for them to tolerate and benefit from this strong drug regime.
• Establishing and providing training and support for the operation of village community banks, giving local people access to loan facilities in order to set up small businesses.

Project activities:

Livestock component (Expansion of a pilot project in 6 initial parish areas)

• Formulation of support groups.
• Provision of training on poultry and goat rearing.
• Supervised construction by beneficiary families of coops and pens for the livestock.
• Purchase and distribution of quality breeding stock (chickens and goats).
• Provision of feed and veterinary care until the stock provided to families is productive.
• Market support.

Food supplement component

• Surveys by project staff of the economic circumstances of people receiving ARV treatment to identify those most urgently in need of nutritional support.
• Rations distributed to the selected beneficiaries on a weekly basis when they attend for treatment at St Elizabeth’s referral hospital in Arusha. The package includes rations of rice, cooking oil, beans, maize, sugar, fruits and vegetables.
• Trained community volunteers will visit homes once a week to ensure as far as possible that the beneficiaries are consuming the food themselves, and their health will be monitored at the monthly HIV/AIDS clinic.