BY MBONO MDLULI
MBABANE – Now that Eswatini is at the verge of controlling the HIV and AIDS epidemic, the Elizabeth Glaser Peadiatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF) will now shift its work to the Ministry of Health.
This transpired today (April 16, 2024) at Mountain View in Mbabane during a workshop where EGPAF was giving an overview of its work to the media practitioners. This follows that Eswatini has now achieved the 95-95-95 target it had set for itself in fighting HIV and AIDS.
Eswatini has 95 percent of people who know their HIV status. Out of the people who know their status in Eswatini, 95 percent of them are on Anti Retroviral Treatment (ART) medication. Out of those that are on treatment in Eswatini, 95 percent of them have their HIV viral load suppressed, which means they can no longer transmit HIV to someone else.
EGPAF’s Aspire Project’s Assistant Director Thandi Masuku stated that because of this prevailing circumstance, the donor, which in many cases is the USAID, would now be shifting its focus to other projects. She said this was because Eswatini had been able to fight HIV and would not need to pump money towards fighting HIV.
She said for this reason, they would be transferring their work to the Ministry of Health. She said at the moment, they were at a stage where they were capacitating the ministry to ensure that it was able to sustain the project. She said they were going to do that for five years and they were now in the third year of this project.
She assured the attendants of the workshop that the Ministry of Health would be able to handle this task. In response, Nobuhle Lukhele-Mthethwa from Eswatini National AIDS Programme stated that the Ministry of Health was working with EGPAF for the smooth transition and she believed that the ministry would be able to sustain the programme because it would have been capacitated.
