Does HIV have to be Trendy?
As the Praekelt Foundation prepares for next week’s AIDS conference in Durban, I reached out to my friends from NGOs. Having recently joined the comms team, I was hoping this would serve as an opportunity to connect like minded development people together, especially since HIV has been the central focus of most of my work in India and Nigeria since 2005.
Instead the responses I received were indifferent.
A friend from an agriculture focused NGO said: “We are hardly working in AIDS relief anymore.”
One wrote: “HIV is no longer in vogue! I don’t even think about it anymore. I used to be obsessed with it.”
I was surprised to see such a lack of interest in what continues to remain a large global health issue impacting millions. HIV today is the largest killer amongst adolescents in Africa, and the second largest worldwide. What happened to what was once the darling cause of the development sector?
For one, issues such as climate change and refugees have taken centre stage in the media. Constantly debated, filmed, and discussed these crisis are on the front of newspapers and people’s minds. Within the cluttered media environment of ISIS, Syria, Zika, and Brexit, the lingering pandemic can’t always compete. There have also been huge strides in anti-retroviral treatments and medical advances in the field which have enabled many people who are HIV positive to live longer and healthier lives. Yet, the conference next week will mark the 21st annual meeting on the subject, and there will still be over 20,000 participants. People still care and understand the importance of the issue.
Praekelt Foundation’s holistic approach to health issues is one of the reasons I joined the organisation. We always start from a person’s lived experience. No-one is just an AIDS statistic, and no-one is just a mother. We believe all social issues, including HIV and AIDS, need to be contextualised, rather than approached as isolated issues. HIV is directly linked to sexual health, which is in turn connected education and literacy which is also directly affected by children and girls’ rights which undoubtedly has roots in poverty and access to resources. If we separate any of these facets, we do a disservice to all of them.
As communities become connected through the web and mobile data, issues will become harder and harder to isolate. This is a good thing as social change organizations can then mirror the reality of complex factors: problems don’t occur in silos. Then maybe every issue will continue to be addressed, even when they stop being trendy.
By Ambika Samarthya-Howard
