Women for Fair Development - HIV/Aids in Malawi

Profile of a Manaso member
By Angela Johnston

Caring for those with HIV/AIDS-related sicknesses in Malawi is sensitive work. When a caregiver from the Malawian community-based organization Women for Fair Development arrives at a patient’s home, she first introduces herself and asks about the patient’s condition. 

The woman helps with tasks ranging from relieving diarrhea, to fetching water to cleaning the house. They advise family members on how to bathe the patient, but themselves have little soap, Vaseline or gloves to do the work.  According to one group member, Ruth Mpando, the women use plastic bags instead of gloves to prevent HIV transmission.

What began as a small group of women discussing HIV/AIDS, and realizing that many of them did not know how to prevent the disease, blossomed into a community-based organization in July 2005 known as Women for Fair Development. The 45 women now work together to provide group therapy, social counseling, home-based care and women’s rights activities as well as encouraging women to go for voluntary HIV counseling and testing from within a small brick office in Chirimba, Malawi. 

Elizabeth Kangume, the deputy executive director of the group says that the women have no formal training in home-based care, they just try to help the sick using the knowledgethey have. She says that the issue of home-based care is close to home for the group because many of the women are HIV-positive or widows worried about their own future as well as their children’s.
Kangume says that the main problem they see during their home-based care visits concerns nutrition. She said that the women may go equipped with the little gear that they have to help a patient, but if the patient is not eating nutritiously, much of the home-based care is in vain - nutrition has a significant impact on the patient’s health, particularly when the client is HIV-positive.

Linnah Matanya, the group’s executive director, said that the women encourage people to grow nutritious food in their own gardens, but often this proves difficult for those who are sick and can not take care of a garden. According to Kangume, the women have been using food from their own homes to feed some of their patients.

Like many community-based organizations in Malawi, the women are lacking both funding and skills, such as training in proposal writing. Matanya said that if the group received extra funding, perhaps they could buy more drugs, soap and herbs for traditional healing methods. Not to mention how bicycles to reach clients, or bicycle ambulances to transport them, would be useful.

Still, the women say they are proud of the office they have built. They foster an open and stigma-free environment within the group. Matanya says that because the women are acting as a unified group, there is no discrimination - she says it becomes possible to mobilize others to go for voluntary counseling and testing. It is important for the women to live in a positive way with being HIV positive.