Projects > Road 2 Recovery

An estimated 5 million South Africans have HIV/AIDS the majority of which are women in child-bearing years (approximately 3 million people). As a result, over 1 million South African children have been orphaned and this number is expected to reach 2 million by 2010 (UNAIDS, 2004). Without access to medication, in particular life-saving anti-retroviral medication, mothers are dying unnecessarily leaving behind them a generation of young children who will have to survive alone. Despite the fact that the SA government has begun to make ARV medication available, less than 10% of people with HIV/AIDS are on medication.

KwaZulu-Natal has one of the highest prevalence rates of HIV countrywide and the availability of medication is only through a handful of district hospitals, located in urban cities. One of the main barriers that prevent mothers living in deep rural villages in KZN from obtaining medication is their inability to pay for transport to travel each month to these hospitals to obtain their medication.

The "Road-to-Recovery" programme addresses a major barrier that is preventing rural mothers with HIV/AIDS from accessing treatment.

As many as 40% of rural South African mothers suffer from HIV (Health Systems Trust, 2003). HIV-positive mothers face tremendous barriers that prevent them from obtaining antiretroviral (ARV) medication and benefiting from treatment. With a 66% unemployment rate, few mothers living in our remote areas have the money to travel to distant AIDS Treatment Centres to receive life-saving medical care.

The UVHAA "Road-to-Recovery" Transportation programme currently sponsors  100 HIV-positive mothers living in deep rural villages in KZN to attend the G.J Crookes Hospital ARV Treatment site to obtain their medication. Each mother is followed up to ensure that she responds well to treatment through regular contact with hospital staff and home-based care teams. A number of clinical measures are recorded for each mother that participates in the programme (including her weight and CD4 count). Demographic data is also collected for each mother (including the number of children that she has and their HIV-status).

As part of the program, 100 HIV-positive mothers have been provided with monthly transport vouchers to travel to the district hospital treatment site to obtain life-saving anti-retroviral medications and healthcare. Mothers are closely monitored by clinical staff and home visits, to ensure that they respond well to treatment, remain healthy and are able to care for their children.

This is the first programme that UVHAA have implemented that focuses specifically on HIV-positive mothers as a priority group.

The project has been in operation for over 14 months and has already enrolled 100 HIV-positive mothers. There are an estimated 4,000 HIV-positive mothers living in this region of KZN that require medication - with further funding, UVHAA hope to enroll an additional 100 mothers in the next 6 months, bringing the total number of programme beneficiaries at the end of the coming year to 200 HIV-positive mothers and ensuring that 600 children get to benefit from an additional year of a mother's love and care.

The "Road-to-Recovery" programme has secured funding for 100 mothers for 6 months and requires additional resources in the form of funding to sustain the programme and to provide a larger number of mothers with transport vouchers.

Another reason that mothers are not accessing medication relates to complex social and emotional factors around stigma and deep fear of abandonment by spouses and communities on disclosing one's HIV status. The result is that many mothers do not go for testing or seek out treatment.

In addition to the 200 mothers we seek to enroll onto this programme, we also wish to respond to the desperate needs of grandmothers who are often left alone supporting their grandchildren after their own children have died. It is  difficult to find donor organisations whose criteria allow them to provide funding
support to grandmothers.

The programme is designed to provide finance for the HIV positive children to travel to the hospital accompanied by their grandmother. The children and grandmothers must travel together as children cannot be seen without the caregiver.

Whilst accurate figures are not available, we estimate that there are over 85 such grandmothers needing our support in our target area in this way.

UVHAA presently support 20 grannies who collect ARV medication for grandchildren or other children whom they care for to travel each month from rural Umdoni and Vulamehlo to the G.J. Crookes Hospital ARV site to collect the children’s medication.

The "Road-to-Recovery" programme is a pioneering programme which is carefully being monitored as a model that can be replicated in other rural areas of South Africa where ARV medication is not yet available at the primary health care level or rural health clinics nearer to those that desperately need medication.

This programme is expected to operate for in the region of 5 years at which point it is anticipated that the South African  government will have "rolled-out" ARV treatment to be made available at all levels of the health care delivery system.

There is however a window period during which HIV-positive mothers living in deep rural areas cannot access medication and grandmothers are stranded, enduring dire economic circumstances on top of their crushing personal tragedies, and it is these immediate and short-term needs that the "Road-to Recovery" programme is responding to. Once medication becomes available at the rural clinic level, HIV-positive mothers who are being sponsored to travel to the G.J. Crookes hospital will be able to obtain medication closer to their homes.

The issue of grandmothers who support AIDS orphans will also unfortunately increase in the next 5 years, and we will ideally need to provide support to an ever increasing number of grandmothers over this period