Home --- Nigeria: Government Urged to Design Policy On PLWHA

A call has been made to the Federal, states, and local governments to formulate a policy that would guarantee the rights of education, employment access to care and support People Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) to mitigate the impact of the desease on the Nigerian society.

  The call was contained in a resolution at the South-west regional conference on HIV by the Network on Ethics/Human Rights Law, HIV/AIDS Prevention, Support and Care (NELA) in Ogba, Lagos.

The conference, which attracted 58 participants from six states in South-west, was funded by International Funding Agencies and USAIDS implementing partners.

A communiqu‚ signed by the Executive Director NNELA, Ibadan, Professor Femi Soyinka, said the objectives of the conference were to introduce participants to NELA's /IHAA community approach to mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS in South-western states, discuss, analyse and share lessons learnt.

It said the conference was also to address issues that promote better community participation and had increased opportunity for networking among participants.

The communiqu‚ explained that the needs of the community to be able to comprehensively respond to the HIV/AIDS pandemic must be reconciled with the agenda of donor/funding agencies adding that more advocacy and activism should be done to persuade the government and its relevant agencies for improved funding for prevention activities, care and support and research.

It held that it was a imperative that government at all levels and all relevant agencies should come up with.

"HIV/AIDS education should be built into all educational curricular with emphasis on improved training of healthcare workers to meet the challenges of care and support for PLWHA.

HIV/AIDS programmes must be community oriented and must be planned to promote sustainability by ensuring participants of communities, use of existing structures, facilitating linkages with all stake holders, and keeping cost to minimum".