Nepwhan Advocates Empowerment For Members

A non-governmental organisation, Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS (NEPWHAN), has stressed the need for the empowerment of people living with HIV/AIDS through the establishment of small scale businesses and other useful ventures capable of making them to contribute to the socio-economic development of the country.

NEPWHAN’s Welfare Officer in Oyo State, Mrs. Bose Ajamu, who said this pointed out that provision of antiretroviral drugs was not all that a person living with the virus needs.

According to her, “ARV is not everything. Without good nutrition, it would not work. This is the reason people living with HIV must be helped to be economically independent.

“Most of them had job before and had spent almost all they had to try to get a cure before they found the right place to get treatment. Such people would definitely need something to kick off without having to rely on people.”

Ajamu declared that eight out of every 10 people currently living with HIV need empowerment, “whether in the form of a loan to start a small scale business, buy equipment to work with or get established in a trade.”

Ajamu, who is the Coordinator of Living Proof Foundation (LPF), an HIV/AIDS-support group at Ode-Aje, Ibadan, noted that women were mostly affected by economic crunch because they could have become widows or disserted by their husbands and would need to cater for their children.

“Currently, we have a case of a woman with HIV, whose house got burnt, her 2-month-old baby died in the inferno, while her six years old child also sustained serious burns. It is the same case in almost all the 532 support groups in Nigeria,” she said.