Hawa Ibrahim and Shaela Wambui live in Kibera, Africa’s largest slum, home to about one million people just outside Nairobi’s bustling city center.
Thanks to an initiative of IFC’s Kenya office, they’ve been tested for HIV and are getting the word out to their friends to join them. “It’s better to know your status,” Hawa says. “I came here because at other places you have to pay.”
Working with a local Kenyan provider of voluntary HIV counseling and testing services, IFC set up three tents within Kibera to provide free HIV testing and advice to the slum’s residents.
The Kenya office also teamed up with the Upendo Society Group, a microfinance borrower group that operates in Kibera, to get the word out to the local community.
The initiative managed to test about 500 Kibera residents and is now documenting the lessons to replicate the program and raise awareness about HIV/AIDS in other communities. Free testing, counseling, and information sessions about living with HIV were also held in the Nairobi office.
The initiative is part of the World Bank Group program that works to ensure that staff, their dependants, and local communities have the necessary information to protect themselves and their loved ones from HIV.
The HIV Workplace Program also aims to ensure that affected people can easily access care and treatment and that the World Bank Group’s working environment supports people living with or affected by HIV.
Kibera was a natural choice for the initiative. Just a short 20-minute drive from the IFC Nairobi office, the slum’s one million people are crammed into just a few squalid square kilometers.
Extreme poverty, a lack of accurate information about HIV, and prostitution means that HIV infection rates are even higher than Kenya’s national infection rate of just under one in ten people. The worst hit are women, infected by idle men who have sex with multiple partners without using protection.
It’s not the first time that IFC’s Kenya office has reached into the local community to raise awareness about HIV. As part of the same program, the office last year provided free HIV testing and counseling to about 100 people in Kayole, another of Nairobi’s slums.
“HIV has affected so many people in Kenya,” says Caren Yuke of IFC Kenya, one of the technical team leaders for the program. “People are dying without even knowing their status.”
With IFC Kenya’s support, that may begin to change.
For more information contact:
Houtan Bassiri
Communications Officer
Nairobi, Kenya
Tel: +254 20 275 9000
Email: hbassiri@ifc.org
