Communities are at the centre of driving initiatives for countries to reach the 95-95-95 targets, i.e., that 95% of people living with HIV know their HIV status, 95% of people who know their status are receiving HIV treatment, and 95% of people on treatment are virally suppressed.
We worked with regional UNAIDS offices in identifying community activists who were driving access to HIV testing, treatment, and care services in countries.
In Condorcanqui, Perú, we spoke to Fernando Chujutalli, Romer Orrego Ikam, and Lourdes Huanca Atencio, indigenous leaders working every day to break down discrimination that affects access to testing, medicine, and care for indigenous communities. The area is hard-to-reach, with medicines usually being delivered by chalupa (long boat) into the Amazon rainforest where the communities live. In Condorcanqui province in northern Peru, many Indigenous communities live in extreme poverty. Lack of access to transportation, reliance on traditional healers, sexual violence, HIV stigma, and services that do not consider these unique circumstances have led to an HIV prevalence of 1.8%, four times the national average. According to Romer, “We need to raise HIV awareness among traditional healers, midwives, community health agents, the shamans, the ayahuasqueros, the spiritualists. At the moment, Indigenous people receive an HIV diagnosis from state health personnel, but we do not know to what extent they understand and are understood.”
In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, we spoke to Musa Sibindi, Executive Director of The Sexual Rights Centre in Bulawayo which empowers people of diverse genders and sexual orientations. Founded in 2007, the Centre offers services throughout southern Zimbabwe. In 2023, it supported 23,836 people. We also spoke to LGBTQIA people who receive services at the centre, including Taboka, non-binary person who has been living with HIV for almost 19 years, and who said the centre was integral towards learning to accept themselves. They said: “I was afraid of going because I wasn’t comfortable with myself. I wasn’t comfortable being in a space with a lot of queer people… You meet a lot of new people, and you hear lots of different stories about queer people’s experiences. That is what really motivated me to learn to accept myself.”