Men and boys reluctant to lose the foreskin

Staff Writer | Monday March 2, 2015 16:05

Since circumcision campaign was launched six years ago in Botswana targeting  to circumcise  some 385 Botswana males, authorities have been forced to revise their targets as the males continue to be elusive.

To date only 38% of the intended target has been achieved.

 This is despite the introduction of less painful circumcision options of PrePex Device.

Even the small figure reported was not easy to reach as health authorities have had to resort to Mop-up campaigns using five mobile clinics to reach out for the male folks. Since its beginning in February 2014, the Early Infant Safe Male circumcision has had One thousand three hundred and eighty seven (1 387) infants circumcised. It has been six years since the PrePex device for medical male circumcision joined the global effort  containing the spread of HIV through pain free circumcision.  As a non-Surgical male circumcision device, prepex was specifically designed to accelerate the scale-up of Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision (VMMC) programmes in countries hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic like Botswana.

The reluctance of local males to circumcise is not only frustrating the local authorities. In 2013 A Japanese company JHPEGO, pulled out from  funding for Safe Male Circumcision (SMC) because Botswana had  failed to meet the target of 40 males per day, which were the terms and conditions of the funding. The programme known as SMC/MOVE was a national strategy that started in October 2012 and was supposed to go on for five years, but  only 10 males on average were circumcised in a day.