HIV testing ‘powered by football’ increase to 30 per cent

[CAPE TOWN] A project that used football to attract the youth and educate them onHIV爱滋病increased testing for HIV by about 30 per cent, an impact evaluation报告has found.

Malawi, where the three-year project was implemented, has one million people living with HIV out of 17.6 million people in the country, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.

“In the past, we usedradio and videos但是，大多数这些媒介都不是很成功。

The project, which started in May 2018 and was administered by the Liverpool Football Club Foundation, the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust and Population Services International , trained two soccer coaches from Chikwawa district who further trained 25 football coaches including four women in early 2020 when it ended.

“健康目标项目的重点是，现有的社区结构可以真正有效地用于健康和发展目标。”

萨拉·贝格（Sara Begg），利物浦热带医学学校

The project distributed over 3,000 HIV self-test kits at football tournaments and outreach meetings.

当一个人收集自己的血液并在隐私方面进行快速测试时，艾滋病毒的自我测试在2016年开始的四年自我测试的非洲倡议中在马拉维流行。

The overall goal of Health Goals Malawi was to raise awareness of the novel HIV self-testing, says Brian Satha, demand creation coordinator for Population Services International (PSI) Malawi.

Soccer coaches were trained to disseminate HIV information in their communities, Chikweba adds. “The coaches are trusted by the people,” he says. “They are youth’s parents outside their home. The fact that the youth would say let’s go and have fun meant they never saw participation in the soccer matches as a health message.”

The PSI Malawi disseminated messages on HIV self-testing and distribution of self-test kits during their Kafukufuku Festival Football tournament, Kafukufuku Research Festival and other community outreach sessions.

“The use of football as a vehicle for delivering this information and these services was universally highly accepted,” says the report published by Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) last month.

根据该报告，有53％的14-24岁的年轻人报告了已经测试了艾滋病毒的年轻人，干预后的百分比上升至83％。

“健康目标项目的重点是，现有的社区结构可以真正有效地利用健康LSTM的研究助理萨拉·贝格（Sara Begg）解释说。evaluation并学习该项目的线索。

“马拉维的健康目标是考虑在多个部门或体育等部门（例如education, health and development to achieve results that are more than just the sum of their parts,” Begg adds.

艾滋病毒自我测试的相关性和重要性在持续的covid-19大流行中变得越来越明显，在这种情况下，艾滋病毒自我测试使艾滋病毒测试服务能够继续提供，同时遵循covid-19 covid-19遏制措施。，健康负责人systemsand policy at the University of Malawi College of Medicine, tellsSciDev.Net大多数测试艾滋病毒的人可能在某个时候寻求治疗，并且很有可能他们的性行为会从高风险变为低风险。

他补充说，建立一些机制可能很重要，以确保对使用测试套件的人进行某种形式的跟进。

“This could include setting up a system that allows the people to inform the health system about their results,” he explains. “In return, the health system [will] … support them to access treatment and other necessary counselling in relation to living with HIV positively.”