Director unhappy about lack of funding for HIV/AIDS activities

Mrs. Theresa Adjei-Mensah, the Deputy Coordinating Director of the Sunyani Municipal Assembly, has expressed concern about the lack of funding for intensified HIV/AIDS campaign and activities in the Municipality.

She said HIV/AIDS sensitization and campaign had gone down drastically in the Municipality because many of the civil society and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) lacked funding to embark on the campaign.

Mrs. Adjei-Mensah told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview on Monday in Sunyani that despite the fact that HIV prevalence in the Municipality dropped marginally from 5.2 per cent in 2014 to 3.2 per cent in 2015, concerted efforts were still required to control its spread.

The Deputy Coordinating Director, who had earlier addressed the mid-year review meeting of the Assembly said due to inadequate funds, civil society and non-governmental organisations were not able to reach out to communities.

Mrs. Adjei-Mensah said the Assembly had directed all NGOs and Community-based organisation’s (CBOs) undertaking HIV/AIDS education and campaign in the Municipality, to submit their work plan to the Assembly.

This is to ensure that the NGOs would undertake their HIV/AIDS activities based on the first 90 campaign of the United Nations Global 90-90-90 fast track target aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to end AIDS epidemic by 2030, she said.

The first 90 campaign is a national HIV campaign, being undertaken by the Ghana AIDS Commission (GAC), and aimed at ensuring that 90 percent of people living with HIV know their status by 2030.

Mrs. Adjei-Mensah said new HIV infections were being diagnosed daily and because HIV education had not gone down well with especially people in rural areas, many of those people were not responding to the call for voluntary testing and counselling.

Source: GNA