As World Aids Day approaches on 1 December, SANDY HAZEL meets Dr Samuel Mtullu, programme manager of the Tanga Aids Working Group in Tanzania
Tanzania is one of the world’s poorest countries, with a life expectancy of 50 years, and has around 1.4 million men, women and children living with HIV and Aids. The country is also home to Oxfam Ireland’s first country based office.
“Having a country office allows Oxfam Ireland to get closer to people on the ground,” says Oxfam’s country representative Peter Bofin. “Our presence here allows us to support the work of poor people more effectively and therefore to spend the money we receive from Oxfam Ireland supporters more carefully.”
One of the projects supported by Oxfam Ireland is the Tanga Aids Working Group (TAWG). An innovative non-governmental organisation, TAWG is dedicated to caring for people with Aids and reducing the spread of HIV.
The group provides home-based care and support to people living with Aids and their families, and collaborates with traditional practitioners to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids through community-based education programmes.
Dr Samuel Mtullu is programme manager of TAWG in Tanzania. “We were invited here by Oxfam Ireland,” explains Dr Mtullu, “to attend a staff forum to make a presentation and explain our work at Oxfam Tanzania so that the Oxfam Ireland staff can have a better understanding of what we do. It is a good opportunity to meet with the programme team here.”
Dr Mtullu’s group deals with care, support and prevention in the area of Aids. “We concentrate in the promotion of prevention in the indigenous population in Tanzania,” he says. “We have about five information centres where we have group meetings and discussion about vulnerable groups. From there we develop an outreach community groups to go out into the community to educate on Aids.”
According to Dr Mtullu, outreach and information are the main weapons in the war against Aids. But geography can be a problem as the vast majority of the population is rurally based.
“In the sense of prevention our biggest problem is that information is not getting delivered properly or effectively,” he says. “Many factors can affect this but mainly it is that the message is not reaching the right amount of people. Some of our communities are very hard to reach. We must get the information to people.”
Apart from information and education programmes, TAWG is also practical. “We have also had assistance in voluntary testing and counselling delivered in these communities,” explains Dr Mtullu. “Letting them know the services are there to help prevent the spread of the HIV infection and to avail of the services is the important thing”.
Do Africans living abroad have a role to pay in helping prevent the spread of Aids? Dr Mtullu is in the affirmative. “They could send word back to their communities, if relevant, that the HIV and Aids are preventable,” he says.
There are success stories amid the sad struggle: “In terms of care, before the arrival of anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs, we were using traditional treatments and we did have some success, with people resuming work and surviving up to 15 years. But now with ARV medicine we can see a change in survival rates and more importantly we are now documenting the changes in communities after our interventions. We are validating these changes.
“We assess the stigma too, before and after intervention. Over a two-year programme we will measure the change in a person and a community where we have introduced an education programme and this is where we can measure our success.”
HIV infection levels have diminished somewhat from 8.1 per cent to 6.5 per cent nationally between 1995 and 2004. Oxfam Ireland is working with seven specialist partner organisations in the north and northeast of Tanzania to promote awareness to change behaviour and to provide care and support to people living with HIV and Aids.
Oxfam is also supporting non-HIV specialist organisations to adapt their work in accordance with the realities of HIV and Aids in their workplace and communities.
The work of the Tanga Aids Working Group has not gone unrecognised, and it has received awards both nationally and internationally, including a Tanzanian Presidential Certificate of Merit in 2004 and a nomination for the International Red Ribbon Award in 2006.
The work of the Tanga Aids Working Group has not gone unrecognised, and it has received awards both nationally and internationally, including a Tanzanian Presidential Certificate of Merit in 2004 and a nomination for the International Red Ribbon Award in 2006.
Dr Mtullu observes that the help of Oxfam Ireland in this work is invaluable: “The Irish and Oxfam Ireland have supported us by helping us to set up information centres and to target the periphery locations and in the districts where the information is needed most.
“We have help from other countries too, we have Aids relief campaigns from the United States which are helping, but the Oxfam Ireland help is very strategic and effective. Yet more needs to be done.”
