Of month end salaries and menses!

So it is the end of Women's Month and what better way to marks its passing than with my monthly menses.

What? Are you shocked? Horrified? Disgusted? Bored? Going to click off now.

I am not surprised, it is generally not something we talk about here in the heartlands of Africa. Actually, it is not really talked about much of anywhere. Yet, logically, it is the reason we are all here. Without menses, there would be no births, no you and me. Mmmm. Don't we need to keep working on this taboo?


Here are some interesting facts:

Studies in Zimbabwe have shown that as many as six girls in ten miss school every month due to their menses! We hear similar stories across the region.

There are many ways to make this much better for girls at school across southern Africa, and it needn't cost the world!

Last year, SNV Zimbabwe asked SAfAIDS to help them launch their Break the Silence Menstrual Hygiene Day Campaign in May. From there, a partnership formed to help pull together the work they have been doing in the programmes in keeping girls in school.

This month we are finalising a Toolkit to help schools and communities better integrate menstrual hygiene management (MHM) for women and girls. The starting point is Water, Sanitation and Health (WASH) but the end point is everyone in the community understanding
            that menstruation is natural and a sign of good health. Check this out!

It is a very exciting package to have helped develop, well done SNV. The partnership took a collaborative approach, building on existing operational research that had produced some discussion cards,  a ReUsable Menstrual Pad (RUMP) making booklet and a general info flyer in draft form.

We took our own expertise, conducted pre-testing at two primary and two secondary schools with school children, teachers, SDC member as well as community gatekeepers and mothers club members and expanded the kit to include the following:

It is a really beautiful kit, and SAfAIDS Design Team really pulled out all the stops!

We really are looking forward to seeing this printed and in use across Zimbabwe and wish SNV and their programme partners all the best in rolling it out.

Would you like to build on this work and begin to develop products around MHM that can break the silence and change the lifes of women, girls, families and communities? Get in touch. In this pack there are tools for young and old, and critically strategies to engage men. On this issue, they are a real game changer! 

So, it is month end and maybe you get a pay check and maybe you don't. But for women, every month they get their menses, and thank goodness they do. Support them.

Break the silence.

The Blog is Back - From Sailboat to Oceanliner SAfAIDS 20 year journey

Twenty Years of Knowledge for Action is surely a reason to celebrate. SAfAIDS was set up in 1994, initially to provide information and support to groups, organisations and individuals responding to the AIDS in southern Africa region. 

SAfAIDS has continuosly adapted to changing needs and emerging priorities and in the process has become a champion of sexual and reproductive health and rights for ALL the people of Africa. 

Just look at the journey we have taken as SAfAIDS, and this is only the highlights- how AWESOME is that. Look closely, there are a lot of firsts in there for SAfAIDS and its HIV partners!

1994 to 1999: Breaking the Silence 

The first steps were critical steps and the foundation stone on Knowledge for Action. Remember our SAfAIDS News magazine? We still get queries for copies to this day and make back copies available for order in our Materials Catalogue. Online versions can be found through the Publications Catalogue on the SAfAIDS Website. We have a brand new Magazine launching this quarter- so watch this space! 

2000 to 2014: An Award Winning Regional Organisation

Information streams alone were/are not enough, people have to get involved along the way and the next five years saw a rapid expansion of the origanisation and its community mobiliations efforts. We have moved into the somewhat HOT area of HEALTH RIGHTS FOR ALL with our key populations efforts going beyond young people, women and girls to include populations in prisons, sex workers and people of varied sexual orientation. 

Look out for our SWAG Bags for sex workers launch in Zimbabwe and South Africa next quarter (there was a quick show-and-tell in Mhondoro, Zimbabwe this month) as well as SRHR materials for exiting prisoners together with policy overview on prison SRHR standards. After all, noone should be left behind if we are to get to ZERO new infections, transmissions and death from AIDS. 

The rest, as they say, is history (or HERstory) as Lois Chingandu took the helm of this ship called SAfAIDS, upgrading it from the small and speedy sail boat to a long distance and durable ocean vessel able to support and reach a whole continent and more!

So that is SAfAIDS @20, thank you for walking with us! Keep walking with us...

Here is how. This year the blog will feature 20 articles on our work in materials development, that is roughly two articles every month. Read and share. It is your story too. 

Stay tuned, stay AWESOME! 

Wishing you PEACE OF MIND over the festive season!

This is the last blog for 2014 and I will be taking a break in January to progress some of those ongoing materials that the blogs have discussed (and a few new ones too!).

So Merry Christmas everyone (thought this little notebook picture with the nutcracker solider was just up our street in materials development).

December is known as a month for PEACE and hot on the heels of WORLD AIDS DAY, peace of mind can also come from knowing your HIV status! I know, Do you know? Does your family know?

The I Know campaign here in Zimbabwe hoped to reach at least 120,000 people over a ten day period for voluntary counselling and testing (VCT). I hope many more have a chance to reflect on the benefits of getting tested over the festive seasons and, like the 16 days of activism, these 10 campaign days become the basis of a 365 days of access to VCT! Stigma is a hard nut to crack and still remains high for people living with HIV. Let's normalise HIV testing, it is a manageable condition.

Need to know more on HIV testing, treatment and care, get in touch with a service provider near you!

Wishing you and your family all that you would wish for yourself in 2015.

What to do if you have been raped!

This week I am keeping it very very simple.

The 16 days of activism against gender based violence has started. In essence it should be 365 days, but these 16 days are to highlight INTENSLY the need for a violence free world and one where women and girls, men and boys live together in harmony.

In Zimbabwe, the National Statistics Office told us this year that in May 2014, 570 women were sexually assaulted- that is 15 women every day subjected to this terrible trauma. Statistics elsewhere do not look much better. Much of it driven by povery.

Our recent efforts as SAfAIDS under our SCORE (Sustainable Communities of Real Excellence) programme baseline survey in four southern african countries gave us realtime information about Sexual Gender Baseed Violence (SGBV) across the age groups - we are very concerned about young people aged 16/17 years, the most vulnerbale age for SGBV.

We are busy crunching the data but this gave me the added impetus to support a local partner here at the Regional Office in Zimbabwe, Adult Rape Clinic, who, with the support of UNFPA and others are rolling out amazing training support in 23 districts that involves medical and legal issues to ensure that those rape cases that are reported are handly well and get all the way to court.

JUSTICE AS PREVENTION!

Our small but important contribution is to print this leaflet for wide distrbution. Go on, be part of it, print and share this with at least one other person. or drag and drop it into your email list and share with EVERYONE.

Well done you!

Bisexual or Intersex?

That got your attention!

This weeks blog is looking at materials that help in understanding sexuality. It's very important. Confusion leads to all kinds of problems. 

The main problem being the first three letters of the word sexuality. Stop giggling!  

SAfAIDS has this groovy programme that has young people right at the centre - Young4Real. It trains young people to understand the fundamentals of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). And because this is life changing for so many young people involved, these same young people become champions and trainers themselves. 

Given the social and cultural taboos around talking about sex with parents, young people, inevitably, get their SRH information from other young people.  


For example, last week SAfAIDS Zimbabwe Country Team were out conducting training with partners using our time-tested YPISA Toolkit. This is when it was discovered that the terms bisexual and intersex were really not well understood. Even the parents needed some support in these tricky areas. 

I am not just being dramatic, there is a lot of confusion. Take the example of the young women in the training who, when discussing STIs, said they had been told that there was an old man in the village who could cure young women of STIs if they slept with him. 

Thankfully we train as teams so local health partners and Ministry of Education were there also. Afterall, it takes a village to raise a child. 

The great news is that tthe Y4R programme is soon to be rolled out formally in Zambia, Swaziland and South Africa, as it seems that young people still have little or no access to the information and services they need to make healthy, informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive lives.  So watch this space as we adapt these materials to have regional appeal.

Governments and leaders across Africa, and beyond, have repeatedly agreed to meet young people's needs, including those relating to sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Check out the tables below:

So let us give them a helping hand. Supply and demand on SRH services for young people is critical.

When is a cure not a cure...when it is undetectable!

Stories of Shattered Hope is a sharing and learning booklet SAfAIDS researched and documented this year with the assistance of the local Zimbabwe UNAIDS office.

The booklet shares experiences of eight women from across the north and south of Zimbabwe who are living with HIV and who at some point in their lives have sought faith-healing on their journey to self-acceptance and wellness. Women and girls remain at higher risk of HIV infection, six times more so than boys and men. Together we can keep each other safe, knowledge IS the power to make a difference!

The stories are not hopeless, but hopefull. 

But not everything goes well, and not all advice is good!

Self-stigma prevented Memory seeking the advice she needed from health facilities and instead she turned to prophets who did not understand HIV.

Otilia and her husband really believed that the prophets in her church had the power to cure HIV, they lost a child and another was born HIV positive.

Why a booklet? 

Adherence to ARV treatment is SO important, too important to not talk about the difficult issues. Especially when people tell us they are cured. Are they?

Medicines are God-Given, even if the are man-made, is the message from Rev. Chiponda.

This booklet’s key messages are:

• HIV and AIDS is a health issue (not demonic or a curse) let us ALL attack it from a health perspective.
• We also need to understand healing in the context of cure– there is no cure for HIV now, only God-given ARVs.
• Church leaders must know the facts about HIV to best support their congregations.

Get in touch to know more about this booklet. 

Information TO the people!

One of the most important things you can do as an information warrior (that's me :D) is take information to where the people are. And they are increasingly on the internet! So many publications and information sources are now going online.

In Africa, you will most likely find the masses on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Yookos, Mxit and Tumblr. So HELLO all of you, hope you are finding this blog edu-taining!

Taking information to the people is not new, SAfAIDS have been doing it for YONKS! As far back as the 1990's SAfAIDS realised that most of the people to be reached with HIV information were at work. So materials were designed for people at work.

The material being showcased in this weeks blog is our time tested and much loved Workplace Wellness Toolkit, supported by Hivos and Stop AIDS Now as well as Sweden-Norad and Oxfam.


Studies suggest that on average, an employee with a chronic illness such as Diabetes Mellitus, HIV or TB, can lose 3 - 4 months of work per year, resulting in potential losses of 20–30% of their annual household income.

The Workplace Wellness Toolkit moved our workplace support materials away from purely HIV to include gender, TB, GBV, lifestyle, culture and a much broader focus on health issues that affect the world of work. It has a number of different parts. So far, the package looks like this:

The Workplace Wellness Toolkit basically comprises of five main materials:

• The Know Much More about Advocacy in the Workplace Manual
• Know Much More about HIV Booklet
• Men as Protectors Preventing HIV and GBV Booklet
• Know Much More about Sexual and Reproductive Health 
• The Wellness@Work Magazine

Comprehensive Employee Wellness Programmes help companies:

Reduce absenteeism

Increase productivity

Lower life insurance premiums

Increase staff morale  

Improve corporate image and corporate clout 

The most recent additions have been the second Workplace Wellness Magazine and the Promoting Good Practices Booklet. Both new pieces, like the original toolkit were based on information gathered from the end user group. An online Monkey Survey of readers from the first edition of the Workplace Wellness Magazine informed the content of the second edition (lots of new information on non communicable diseases and stress management - sign of the times for sure!).

The Good Practices Booklet looked closely at some successful projects in Zimbabwe and South Africa and unpacked some of the characteristics of their effectiveness, so everyone can improve their efforts (this included cost effectiveness for those budget conscious readers!).

SAfAIDS is currently updating its Workplace Support Programme and Organisational Outreach Support Packages- I am sure there is one to suit you so do get in touch.