Impact and Development Initiative presented this during a meeting yesterday in Lagos.
The 2019 Nigeria HIV/AIDS Indicator and Impact Survey Results (NAIIS) show that the country’s overall HIV prevalence among people aged 15 to 49 is 1.4%.
This explains the 1.9 million estimated HIV-positive individuals in Nigeria. However, because females are more than twice as likely to be HIV-positive as men, women aged 15 to 49 are disproportionately affected.
Access to life-saving sexual and reproductive health and rights services, including as contraception, HIV testing, pre-exposure prophylaxis, and antiretroviral medication, is restricted for adolescent girls and young women living with HIV or nonexistent.
This is mostly because there aren’t many healthcare facilities or skilled healthcare workers available. According to the 2021 People Living With HIV Stigma Index, 60% of Nigerians have negative attitudes toward people living with HIV, and 20% of people living with HIV have experienced HIV-related stigma.
As a result, people refrain from getting tested for HIV or seeking treatment when they do.
The executive director of the sustainable impact and development initiative, Ms. Elizabeth Williams, urged youths to share the knowledge and skills they had acquired with their peers while speaking at the sustainable impact and development initiative under the We Lead project supported by HIVOS.
Additionally, she urged all relevant parties—including the government, civil society organizations, academic and religious institutions, private sector organizations, parents, and media organizations—to cooperate in order to guarantee that everyone, particularly young women living with HIV, has access to treatment in order to achieve viral suppression.
The executive director of the sustainable impact and development initiative, Ms. Elizabeth Williams, urged youths to share the knowledge and skills they had acquired with their peers while speaking at the sustainable impact and development initiative under the We Lead project supported by HIVOS.
Additionally, she urged all relevant parties—including the government, civil society organizations, academic and religious institutions, private sector organizations, parents, and media organizations—to cooperate in order to guarantee that everyone, particularly young women living with HIV, has access to treatment in order to achieve viral suppression.
“We must all support people with HIV and not stigmatize or exclude them,” she emphasized. By doing this, we will get one step closer to ending the AIDs pandemic in Nigeria by 2030.
“The Sustainable Impact and Development Initiative for Adolescent and Youth is a youth-led non-governmental organization that is committed to enhancing the sexual and reproductive rights of adolescents and young people in Nigeria’s rural and urban regions.
“Our objective is to create a society where every young person, regardless of socioeconomic background, may realize their full potential free from issues with sexual health.
“We Lead is an innovative and comprehensive program that strives to increase the influence and status of young women who are most commonly denied their right to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRH-R). It focuses on young women and adolescent girls who have HIV, identify as LBTI, have a disability, or are experiencing displacement.
Meanwhile, some of the recommendations include: putting into practice tactics that give HIV-positive individuals financial autonomy to pay for their medications; ongoing HIV/AIDS awareness through campaigns; positive advocacy utilizing art and technology; and providing numerous areas of access to appropriate information and services.
The suggestions made by the participants would be included in a policy brief that would help determine how to boost young women living with HIV’s access to sexual and reproductive health information and services.
Some of the lessons learned were highlighted by the training’s attendees, who said things like, “I learned more about PREP (Pre-exposure prophylaxis) and speaking up in situations of discrimination from any aspect.
