Members of the Journalists Living with HIV (JLWH) network in Southern Africa in September gathered in Pretoria, South Africa to share ideas on the role they can play in fighting the pandemic.
The regional workshop was organised by PSAf through the HIV/AIDS programme, under the theme: Towards effective behaviour change communication in Southern Africa: Communicating HIV prevention. It brought together 18 journalists from Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania and Namibia.
PSAf believes that as JLWH, they have so much power to promote and raise profile of HIV Prevention using their various platforms.
The workshop aimed at enhancing the journalists’ understanding of epidemic trends, and country progress in meeting HIV/AIDS commitments. Different approaches were used to sensitise journalists living with HIV on the role they can play in advancing HIV Prevention. Key regional prevention issues and priorities were also discussed as a way of sensitizing the journalists.
The participants used the workshop to share survival skills, plan for country activities and devise strategies for cross-sharing of ideas.
Among others, the participants discussed issues of Prevention of mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT), Multiple concurrent sexual partnerships, Impact of HIV/AIDS on local governance, and HIV Prevention for sexual minority groups.
After the workshop participants said they felt very empowered and motivated to do more investigative reporting on factors that fuel HIV infection in their countries. They went on to make plans on how they would enhance their work on behaviour change communication. The journalists also planned to interrogate their country-level prevention priority areas and programmes to assess how these interact with people’s behaviours and opinions in order to inform policy and programming directions as well as behaviour change and service uptake.
“This was a very fruitful workshop, as an HIV positive journalist, I feel more empowered to address HIV/AIDS using my platform for the benefit of everyone. I must say, talking to other HIV positive journalists has also raised my self-esteem,” said one of the participants.
“We should continue with this platform for HIV positive journalists, I have learnt a lot and as always, it was eye-opening,” said another participant, adding that: “It was good to have stakeholders like UNAIDS, SIDA and IDASA addressing us. This was really inspiring.”
To maximize impact, PSAf conducted this workshop in partnership with a number of like-minded institutions namely the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA)
The UNAIDS representative Zenawit Melesse sensitised journalists on the status of the epidemic in East and Southern Africa, and provided an update on the current response. Journalists appreciated the regional picture of the current epidemic trends. The presentations made them even more aware of the gap in communication of prevention in order to further bring down the incidents rates in the region.
Giving a donors’ perspective on the important role that journalists can play in enhancing the HIV/AIDS response, SIDA representative Chilamo Sikazwe said she had been personally affected, and emphasised the important role of journalists in communicating and promoting prevention.
To address issues around the impact of HIV/AIDS on governance and development in the region, Marietjie Oelofsen from IDASA’s HIV/AIDS programme made a presentation that touched on the fact that an effective response to HIV/AIDS both at national and regional level depended on good governance and principles of accountability, democracy and human rights.
