HIV/AIDS
We help people to live with dignity.
AIDS is the most devastating pandemic humankind has ever faced, taking over 25 million lives in the last 25 years.
33.2 million people are currently living with HIV with millions more affected by parallel epidemics of poverty, stigma and discrimination.
What we're doing
Trócaire takes dual approach to HIV - addressing HIV in all development programmes and supporting partners who provide prevention, care and treatment services and challenging injustices that perpetrate the spread of the virus.
Trócaire spends almost €3 million annually on HIV, and this is expected to rise over the coming years. In sectors such as livelihoods, Trócaire is assisting partners to modify programmes for a world with AIDS, as families affected by HIV are often more vulnerable to food shortages. Programmes are also modified to be appropriate for child headed households, carers and for people with limited or no assets due to HIV and AIDS.
Trócaire works with organisations that provide prevention, care and treatment that supports national efforts, deals with the holistic needs of individuals and the poverty dimension of the epidemic. Income generating activities, life-skills, psychosocial support and education are considered integral parts of a holistic response to HIV. Underpinning all responses is a commitment to address the gender dimension of the epidemic.
Love and Hope in Kenya
Mary Akai is as colourful as the beautiful Kenyan landscape. A member of the HIV/AIDS support group at Love and Hope Centre, three of her children died of AIDS. She calls the founder of the centre, Sr Patricia Speight, her new mother. “I thought I was dying,” she said. “I owe my recovery to Sr Patricia. She fed me from a spoon when I was too low.”
Belfast-born Franciscan missionary Sr Patricia Speight and her team of counsellors and education officers work with 400 HIV-positive clients in the slums of Nakuru, Kenya’s fourth biggest city.
Maina Erastus, a large gentle man with a warm smile, has seen a lot of human tragedy. A Kenyan man who works for Trócaire’s partner, the Love and Hope Centre in Nakuru, Kenya, he is intimately familiar with the devastation that HIV/AIDS is wreaking on Africa, and particularly African women.
“Definitely the biggest number of our clients are women,” Maina explained. “The stigma when someone has AIDS is still pretty bad. What’s great to see here is how women have overcome that self-stigma and come to Love and Hope. Now we are trying to bring in their men, through them,” he explained. “Men are afraid to come forward. And some men believe they were infected by their women. Then we take them through a past history that usually throws up previous relationships where the virus could have been transmitted.”
A key part of the work of Love and Hope is education and awareness raising in the communities. Behavioural change is key, Maina said, to stop the spread of the disease and particularly to protect women. “Economically men are more stable when they are HIV positive. They are able to eat well, they look well and they can spread the disease. In some areas, something called wife inheritance takes place, where if her husband dies a woman is passed on to one of his brothers as his wife. In some cases women have to go a HIV positive family,” Maina said.
Love and Hope also offers home-based care to those who are too ill to come to the centre, counsels those who are affected and tries to ensure that children whose parents have died of AIDS can go to school and have enough to eat.
