Suggested Areas for Giving
Given the clients’ giving interests and the current needs for HIV prevention, I’d suggest thinking about giving to the following initiatives:
- Preventing Mother to Child Transmission. Mothers2Mothers is a South African charity (with fundraising offices in the US and UK) that trains, employs, and supports Mentor Mothers, or mothers living with HIV. These Mentor Mothers work alongside doctors and nurses in understaffed health centers to educate pregnant women with HIV on how to prevent HIV in their children and keep their families healthy.
Mothers2Mothers has found that the women Mentor Mothers serve are more likely to take antiretroviral drugs to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Furthermore, the infants of mothers in the Mothers2Mothers program are more likely to receive ARVs than those infants whose mothers are not in the program.
- Promoting voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) Jhpiego, (Johns Hopkins Program for International Education in Gynecology and Obstetrics) funds projects in safe, medically supervised male circumcision. Population Services International provides a suite of voluntary medical male circumcision services and advocacy in Africa, and recently circumcised its one millionth client.
- Preventing violence against women. HIV disproportionally affects women over men in Sub-Saharan Africa. Women are more likely to be HIV positive, and because of the unequal gender dynamics in many African communities, women are often not able to make their own decisions about their sexual relationships. Too many times, it’s their husbands or boyfriends who make the decisions for them.
The Ugandan-based nonprofit, Raising Voices (very kindly suggested to me by Dr. Helen Epstein herself), works on reducing intimate partner violence, and recently conducted a controlled trial of a program that not only reduced partner violence, but also reduced sexual concurrency.