The Deputy Upper East Regional Minister, Mrs. Lucy Awuni has underscored the need for Non-Governmental Organizations working in the areas of HIV/AIDS to focus more on behavioural change for society to treat people living with HIV/AIDS with compassion and respect.

She stated this during the Ghana Aids Commission Small Grants Disbursement to Local Partner NGOs in the Upper East Region in Bolgatanga at the weekend.

The NGOs were selected by the Ghana AIDS Commission based on their previous performance on HIV/AIDS activities they carried out and other outstanding performance in discharging their duties in their field of operation.

Each of the funded NGOs is to get 8,000 Ghana cedis on quarterly basis. They were however given half of the money in Cheque and receive the other half of the money after submitting their reports upon completion of the implementation of each phase of the programme.

They are the Centre for Community Initiatives (CODI), Belim Wusa Development Agency (BEWDA), Programme for Rural Integrated Development (PRIDE), Zuuri Organic Vegetable Farmers Association (ZOVFA) Integrated Rural Development Centre, (IRUDEC) and Youth Action on Reproductive Order (YARO), the lead agency.

Mrs. Awuni noted that because of the stigma attached to people living with the disease many of them fail to report to health facilities about their status in order to have access to the treatment and thereby go about knowingly or unknowingly to spread the disease among unsuspected persons.

She asked the NGOs to do more advocacy programmes and encourage people to go for voluntary counseling and testing to know their HIV/AID status so as to enable them manage their health status and also take the antiretroviral drugs where they are diagnosed to be positive to prolong their lifespan.

She indicated that Government had set up HIV/AIDS Testing Counseling Centres in every health district to make the facility available to everybody.

The Deputy Minister emphasized that those people affected with the disease were not hopeless adding “what we ought to do is to manage them through the administration of the antiretroviral drugs to boost their immune system and prolong their life”.

She noted that it was against this back drop that the present government proposed in its campaign that it would negotiate with the Wealth Health Organization (WHO) and other agencies to ensure the provision of free anti-retrovirus drugs for HIV/AIDS patients was extended and made sustainable and said Government was working towards that.

She urged all NGOs and other Development partners to encourage and support People Living with HIV/AIDS to enroll into the National Health Insurance Scheme for the treatment of other opportunistic infections.

She called on the six selected local partner NGOs to use the grants judiciously and on targeted programme areas to achieve optimum results because the Commission was finding it hard sourcing funding especially due to the world economic crunch.

She further stated that prevention was the surest way to combat the disease and urged organizations working on HIV/AIDS education to embark on massive educational drive to stem the trend to reduce the level of spreading of the disease.

In his welcome address the Executive Director of YARO, Mr. Douri Bennin Hajei, said the three Northern Regions were known to be the poorest and that the situation could become worse if the HIV/AIDS menace was not curbed.

Source: http://allafrica.com

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