By Munyaradzi Doma
A worrying trend of stigma and discrimination obtaining in the country will derail the successes that have been made in the HIV response, Executive Director of Zimbabwe National Network for People Living with HIV, Tatenda Makoni has revealed.
Makoni revealed this during an International Conference on Aids and STIs in Africa (ICASA) side session which was organised by Aids and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa (ARASA). The side session was running under the theme: “Expanding needs, diminishing means, shrinking civil space and funding for HIV and sexual reproductive health programming in Africa.”
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), “social stigma in the context of health is the negative association between a person or group of people who share certain characteristics and specific disease.
“In an outbreak, this may mean people are labelled, stereotyped, discriminated against, treated separately, and/or experience loss of status because of a perceived link with a disease.
“Such treatment can negatively affect those with the disease, as well as their care givers, family, friends and communities.” And according to UNAIDS, it is said, “Stigma and discrimination impedes the HIV response at every step, limiting access to: Stigma and discrimination increases the risk of HIV acquisition and progression to AIDS, violence, and marginalization while reducing access to education, employment and justice.”
Makoni revealed that the stigma index of 2022 has revealed some shocking statistics, evidence that a lot had to be done to get things right.
“Of-course there is stigma and discrimination, I will go at length the whole night to talk about the stigma and discrimination but I want to speak on the last stigma index that we did in 2022 and the figures are alarming, they are shocking, they are unacceptable.
“At a point when we thought that stigma was going to go down, it actually rose because when we are talking about the six-year mark towards 2030, we are supposed to see a drop in terms of stigma and discrimination, but actually it’s on the rise.
“From 2014 study it was on 65,5 percent, but 2022 study it rose to 69,7 percent and that is something we do not need to look at with a good eye.
“It means there is something that we are not doing right as a country. Yes we are performing well in terms of the indices but when we look at the programming around stigma and discrimination, there is no clear programme that is dealing with stigma and discrimination, yet we are all agreeing that stigma and discrimination is there at prevention, is there at treatment.
“We are not doing anything about it, what we are doing is that we are just taking piecemeal approaches to addressing stigma and discrimination,” said Makoni.
He added that equally worrying was the increase in internalised stigma, which has led to many mental health issues.
Makoni revealed that in the most serious cases, victims don’t just feel unloved or unworthy, but some end up committing suicide. “What is also more shocking for me is that the current stigma index study took another dive.
We are now witnessing more of internalised stigma, and that needs a new paradigm in terms of dealing with stigma and discrimination.
“It’s no longer the opaque stigma that you see but now it’s internalised, people feeling unloved, hence we now have mental health issues, we now have a number of drug and substance abuse, hence we now have the increase in the number of people also committing suicide,” he added.
