By LYDIA NAMUBIRU, KHATONDI SOITA, KERRY CULLINAN, ARYA KARIJO, ES-TACIO VALOI, STEPHANIE OHUMUIn the days before the Covid-19 crisis, Ugandan sex worker Lillian Namiiro worked on the Tanzanian border, educating fellow sex workers and connecting her community to the national HIV response.
She would remind government workers to send antiretroviral drugs to nearby health centres and checked on whether sex workers needed drug refills.
Health workers and sex workers in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and Mozambique, said they came up with creative ways to ensure registered HIV patients continue receiving drugs: Home deliveries using bikes, multi-month refills, among others.
“We expect many more new cases of HIV to be reported in the coming months and weeks,” says Thomas Abol, executive director of Keeping Alive Society’s Hope (KASH), a Kenyan organisation that serves sex workers and men who have sex with men.
In South Africa, Megan Lessing, spokesperson for the NGO Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce, said their outreach work — going into communities to talk to sex workers where they live and work — and their walk-in HIV clinic stopped for the first five weeks of lockdown.
