HIV/Aids in Botswana.

by sophierichards11 (student)

Botswana HIV/Aids

Botswana

Botswana is situated in the Southern African regions, and is a land locked country bordered by Zambia and Zimbabwe to the northeast, Namibia to the north and west, and South Africa to the south and southeast. Its capital city is Gaborone and the population living in the country reaches a sparse number of 1.9 million with 46% of the land urbanised due to the land being so dry.

People in Botswana have their official language as English but Setswana is the national language. The life expectancy in this area is higher than most LEDC’s with men reaching an age of 56 and women reaching an age of 55. Life expectancy has dropped significantly from the years 1990-95, when the age was 65 to below 40 between 2000-05 though nowadays there are more prevention schemes and treatment programmes in Botswana to deal with health issues. Adult literacy in the country is about 81% due to many people being educated.

The country is also the world’s largest producer of diamonds transforming the nation into a middle income nation. Botswana additionally, protects some of Africa’s largest areas of wilderness due to the dry land that cannot really be ploughed for crops but s great to house the wilderness of Africa.

Factors helping to spread the epidemic

No money

There is not enough money in Botswana to help stop the spread of the epidemic and help it from spreading out of control, quickly enough. Without this important money government can not gain the right prevention tools to help deal with the spread, like more condoms or education. Although, recently Botswana has had more help from other countries through international aid as they were once, the worst hit African country with aids. This was with help from United Nations urging them to gain international help to stop the epidemic before it got out of control.

No Medication

In the early years of the HIV epidemic, Botswana had little or no medication to stop the epidemic from spreading meaning more people became infected with the disease. This is through the lack of available health care that was around in the 1970’s onwards in Botswana. Though the medication is not a cure it does help the sufferer to live longer and live a more productive live. Without the benefit of these medications (antiretroviral drugs) the people of Botswana fell victim to aids at alarming rates.

Cultural Differences

This is a main reason why people have fallen ill to aids. In Botswana religious groups are against people using condoms to prevent the transmission of aids in the country meaning more people became ill to aids as they did not use protection. Moreover, many people in Botswana have multiple sex partners due to their cultural beliefs, increasing the risk of transmission due to the shear number of sexual contacts that they come into contact with.

Finally, people with HIV in Botswana do not tell their partners that they have got the disease and therefore do ...

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Cultural Differences

Finally, people with HIV in Botswana do not tell their partners that they have got the disease and therefore do not take enough precautions to prevent the disease spreading.

Reasons for high number of deaths

A main reason for the high number of deaths in Botswana is due to the poor health care in African countries as they are an LEDC and do not have the same access to healthcare as do the MEDC’s in other areas in the world. As health care is so poor, people are not diagnosed with aids as quickly as someone in an MEDC. This then means that by the time they are diagnosed it is properly to late for them to help in any way that could save their live. Furthermore, HIV affects the immune system making the sufferer more likely to contract other diseases easily. These diseases could be fatal and end up killing the person especially as the health care system is not the best in the world and is properly not prepared to deal with diseases.

In addition, some religious tribes in Botswana do not agree with what the government wants to do in order to prevent or treat a person with HIV, for example one tribe does not agree with using condoms and therefore will tell the rest of the tribe not to use them meaning more people in that tribe become affected by HIV.

Effects

Social

The education sector of Botswana is also affected by aids as children are pulled out of school to help generate money for the family in this time of need. This means that fewer people are receiving a basic school education so the prospects for them in the future are damaged as they can not get the high end jobs that pay good money. Additionally, people have proven that children who do not receive or receive little education are almost twice as likely to contract HIV causing a larger epidemic to occur in Botswana.

Health care sector is affected as well as the demand for doctors and nurses rise as more people are living with HIV. This puts a strain on the health sector as more health workers are needed to be trained up and more doctors and nurses are needed to help with the many deaths and people living in the area.

Another social effect in Botswana is life expectancy going down dramatically. Many countries in Africa including Botswana, have erased their life expectancy by many years meaning the average life expectancy in Sub Saharan Africa is 51, with Botswana’s life below that of the average due to it having the highest number of HIV people and deaths. This decline in life expectancy is directly due to HIV and aids in the country.

Economic

When a person becomes infected with HIV, the family’s income slowly begins to dwindle as money is not coming into the family. Medical bills increase substantially for the family’s and especially in Botswana as not many people can afford to keep up and pay the bills off so they keep on increasing in size. Other members in the family also suffer as they have to come out of school or work in order to take care of the person with HIV meaning another loss of income. If the person dies from the disease, there is a permanent loss of income due to funeral/mourning costs, medical costs that need to be paid and other things money needs to be spent on like food and rent.

In Botswana, about half of the households are headed by females, so if the mother dies from HIV the children she has then become orphans. Because of this many children have become orphans in Botswana meaning a higher dependency ratio of young people in the country.

Aids has also has an impact on firms in Botswana. The impact on the firms was an increase in expenditure due to health care costs, burial fees and training and recruitment of replacement employees (loss of labour). With a loss of labour from the company, the company’s productivity slows down which in turn slows down the economic activity of the company and the social progress.

Aids does not only affect the individual and the family, but it is also affecting Africa’s and Botswana’s economy growth and development to try and get out of poverty. This in turn has significantly affected Botswana’s and Africa’s ability to cope with the epidemic itself meaning they are lacking behind in treatments for HIV even though Botswana was the first African country to provide the antiretroviral drugs.

Treatment/Prevention

In Botswana there are many different types of prevention and treatment programmes to try and stop HIV/Aids from spreading all over the country and additionally, were the first African country to provide antiretroviral drugs for all its citizens.

Public education and awareness

Before in Botswana, public awareness and education was mainly based on the ABC programme of aids: Abstain, Be faithful and Condomize. This message was seen all over the country along with safe sex billboards and posters, but some people thought this was not enough as it was unclear whether anyone was paying attention to them. Nowadays, the aim is to target the right people with the right message like radio dramas informing people of the dangers of aids and encouraging people to change their sexual behaviours. Additionally, HIV education has been taken to the doorsteps of people as well as workplace peer counselling by the Total Community Mobilization (TCM) programme in Botswana. TCM covers the whole of Botswana and ran from 2001 to 2005 and the programme uses a combination of thought thinking shared ideas and life experiences to get people to go and have HIV testing in the area. They worked closely with the government to make sure people fully understood the aids epidemic and what it was doing to the country and themselves.

Condom distribution and education

Since 1993 Population Services International (PSI), has helped to promote the ‘Lovers Plus’ condom and the ‘Care’ female condom since 2002. It is the main condom disrupter in Botswana and uses a variety of different locations such as fairs, festivals, shopping malls, workplaces and bars to promote education of condom use and aids. In 2003 the government, along with ACHAP launched a massive condom distribution and marketing campaign involving the instillation of over 10,500 condom dispensers in both traditional and non-traditional outlets in the country.

Targeting of high risk adult populations

The population of Botswana that is classed as high risk adult populations include migrant workers, diamond miners and sex workers. These are the main areas that have a high number of HIV due to same sex relations and sew work which is illegal in Botswana. At the moment government workers and health workers are trying to target these areas to get them to understand what they are doing and how they are increasing the risk of them getting HIV in the long run.

Improvement of blood safety

Both the Ministry of Health and the Safe Blood for Africa Foundation have helped to improve the safety of blood transfusions throughout Botswana. From 2005 onwards, the national supply of HIV-free blood has doubled in size and the amount of HIV-infected blood has fell by half due to the better screening of donors and counselling from the government.

A project associated with the improvement of blood transfusions is ‘Pledge 25’ which recruits and encourages young people to become blood donors and to teach them how to prevent HIV infection. People under this scheme are encouraged to pledge blood 25 times during their life, hence why it is called Pledge 25.