NAHPA laments diminishing support
Pini Bothoko | Monday May 23, 2022 04:36
NAHPA’ national coordinator, Ontiretse Letlhare disclosed the concern when addressing Public Accounts Committee (PAC) hearing yesterday.
He said it is of great concern that they continue to receive signals from the countries’ major funders such as Global Fund and PEPFA that their support to Botswana is about to come to an end.
Letlhare explained that such responses are due to the fact that the country has attained upper middle economy status.
However, he said they are not folding their arms and wait for the worst to happen because the government has already registered with the Global Fund’s pooled procurement system which has the potential to cut the costs of treatment for both HIV and NCDs.
Additionally, Letlhare said Global Fund and other key partners, the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), are supporting the country in the development of a transitional and sustainability plan for the post donor support period.
Letlhare stated that other issues of great concern are behaviorial change, which is still low and inadequate amongst citizens to match challenges posed by HIV and NCDs. He stated that behaviour determines risk of HIV infection and certain social groups are more vulnerable to infection than others.
In responding to the issue, Letlhare revealed that NAHPA is addressing the problem by partnering with civil society organisations to intensify campaigns and education to deliver HIV and NCDs prevention messages to the public.
“NGOs are helpful to NAHPA because they have direct access to the people even from far flung areas therefore we continue to fund them annually and we make sure that they account, making sure that the funds are not used for something else,” he said.
Moreover, Letlhare stated that progress has been made to fight HIV/AIDS adding they have carried out Botswana Aids Impact Survey (BAIS) study to establish the state of the pandemic and assess the impact on HIV and programming in the country.
“The preliminary results of this study were released in December 2021 and they show that the population aged between 15-64 years has an HIV prevalence of 20.8% while that of age between 15-24 years stands at 3.4 percent and 27.1% for the age between 25-64 years. These results indicate that the HIV positive population for the county is ageing as compared to what obtained in the previous surveys,” Letlhale said.
He stated that previously they had a situation in which the burden of the virus was in the younger age bracket, but now there is a shift towards the older age. Letlhale explained that this shows that the intervention of government particularly on treatment is bearing fruits.
“It shows that people who are on treatment and adhering to treatment live longer and the other strategy that we are using to make sure that we minimise new infections particularly in the younger population are also bearing fruits that is why we have a much prevalence at the younger ages,” he said.
Letlhare further said what is pleasing is that 95.1% of the country’s population who have tested know their HIV status while 98% of those who have tested positive are enrolled on Antiretroviral therapy (ART). Moreover, he stated that 97.9% of those enrolled on treatment are viral suppressed.
“This shows that Botswana has attained the 2016 to 2022 as well as the 2021-2025 global targets of 90, 90,90 and 95, 95, 95 respectively and thus on the right path to reach epidemic control and end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030,” he said. Commenting on the matter, PAC member and the Member of Parliament (MP) for Tonota, Pono Moatlhodi expressed concern that if the donors pull out the government is going to struggle to offer HIV treatment to non-citizens. Government has spent $6 million (about P60 million) in treating non-citizens.
“Our donors are threatening to pull out where are we going to get the P60 million to treat non-citizens,” Moatlhodi said.