Teens Club, Sentebale Partner In ARV Adherence

Lebogang Baingapi | Monday March 6, 2017 15:44

The partnership was confirmed by the District AIDS coordinator Stella Keipeile in an interview saying the two organisations will sign a memorandum of understanding soon. She said Sentebale will also provide financial support to the club and the partnership will run for a period of three years.

Keipeile said adolescents living with HIV face different challenges that impact on their lives especially during their transition to adulthood. She said they suffer isolation which uniquely affects them both emotionally and psychologically. “Poor adherence was identified as a problem because those children depend on their guardians for supervision who are sometimes occupied,” she said.

Sentebale is a charitable organisation founded in 2006 by Prince Harry of United Kingdom and Prince Seiso of Lesotho with a mandate to help the most vulnerable children in Southern Africa receive the support they need to lead healthy and productive lives.

In Jwaneng, adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) on adolescents and children has drastically improved, thanks to the Jwaneng Teens Club which has firmly taken a bold step of bringing children on treatment under one roof to boost their confidence and encourage good adherence to medication.

The club, made of adolescents living with HIV, was piloted by Botswana–Baylor Children’s Clinical Centre of Excellence to provide life skills in education, peer support, counselling and other youth-friendly services. The core mandate of the club is to support adolescents who have fully disclosed their HIV status and have secured consent from their parents to register with the club. The club has a vision to fight stigma and discrimination and empower them to live a normal life and see life in a different way.

It is against this background that the two entities partnered to share skills.

They met beginning of February and discussed issues of strengthening components of advocacy where adolescents will be empowered to voice their needs, as well as monitoring and evaluating each adolescent’s progress. Jwaneng, which is a mining town, has a population of 18,008 people with an HIV prevalence of 12.8%, with females leading with 16.7% while men are at 8.5%.

Statistics from the District AIDS office reveals that 3,615 people in the town are on ARV, of which 2,101 are women and 1,414 are men. Currently a total of 122 children and adolescents are on antiretroviral therapy, of which 62 are between the ages of 15-19 years.