Youths and national development

UNDP overview: Enhancing household capacity to respond to HIV/AIDS
As the old adage goes; “if you want something to be done well, do it yourself.”

With the current pervasive HIV and AIDS pandemic that has ravaged most of the human population, scientific researchers, governments and their variants have proposed several counteractive measures to reverse the situation but with less success.

But since the multifaceted challenges of the pandemic mostly affects women and youths, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) came up with a discussion forum on the Youth Friendly Version of the Zambia Human Development Report that addressed the theme “Enhancing Household Capacity to Respond to HIV and AIDS.”

The discussion forum, which started in Ndola on April, was a new initiative that was introduced by the UNDP in December 2007 to work with the most affected groups by HIV and AIDS, who are the youths and women in all provinces in the country.

Taking advantage of social and economic ills, the impact of the pandemic is more pronounced among the young people and women.

These groups are mostly crippled by the quandary of unemployment and pangs of poverty, which have currently been worsened by HIV and AIDS and other opportunistic defies.


Against this backdrop, UNDP National Economist, Elda Chirwa argues that the Zambia Human Development Report (ZHDR) identified households and youths as the centre and most effective response to HIV and AIDS in Zambia because they were the primary units for coping with HIV and AIDS consequences.

Ms Chirwa added that analyzing the way HIV and AIDS affected households and the young generation would help to overcome some of the challenges the pandemic posed in the world over as it drew possible solutions from the people who were directly affected by the impacts of the pandemic.

Following the UNDP’s overview, encompassed in the concept of enhanced household capacity to respond to HI/AIDS, Zambia had made great strides to respond to epidemic, although the efforts never matched the results.

Ms Chirwa said this suggested that the programmes could not have been efficient enough on focusing the efforts where it matters most.

Precisely, a household is an individual or group of people living together, sharing a quarter or food daily or occasionally.

To this end, the UNDP argued that placing households at the centre would make the response more effective since the impacts of HIV and AIDS were felt more at the household level.

Ms Chirwa said those impacts were remitted by various transmission mechanisms and then by aggregation adversely affected several sectors at the macro levels.

“Households are the primary units for coping with HIV and AIDS and its consequences because they carry the greatest burden of the disease and need to be empowered to take action against it,” she said.

She added that focusing on the smallest social unit in society-the household, gives us the better opportunity to understand many facets of HIV and AIDS.

With such a background, she said, different players from national level to grassroot would be helped to identify their specific strengthens in responding to the pandemic.

“This will also give insights to how diverse efforts can be coordinated for maximum impact. Further, analyzing the way HIV and AIDS affects the household can also help overcome the challenges the pandemic poses for institutions, such as sector ministries and non-governmental organisations as they work to achieve their mandates,” she said.

Ms Chirwa said focusing on the household helped to isolate the impacts of various initiatives and measure them.

This entails a model shift from trying to seek for solutions to the intricate of HIV and AIDS in offices of planning departments of the state and NGOs, leaving out the directly affected individuals.

It means engaging individuals, families, and other small units to say out the effects of HIV and AIDS to their income, workforce, and other burdens that come as a result of ravaging HIV and AIDS.

Ms Chirwa argued that UNDP sought possible solutions to the net effects of the pandemic, which had a prevalence rate that reflected deeper rooted disproportionate problems.

The UNDP Economic chief added that HIV and AIDS undermined the future prosperity of the nation as it paralysed the most productive age groups and worsened the gender divide.

She said that signaled the unequal power relations between men and women that were embedded in socialization, cultural beliefs and lack of economic empowerment of women, which greatly fueled the spread of HIV.

Further, Ms Chirwa said the instincts of youths were complicated, and required an approach that met the young people’s needs at ground level, hence the UN system in the country engaging youths in coming up with a document that reflected their views vis-à-vis HIV and AIDS.

She said with HIV\AIDS and poverty reinforcing each other, issues arising from the duo had to be viewed with great apprehension since the fragile parts of the Zambian society (youths and women) was already staggering under the immense weight of poverty, lack of jobs, lack of quality education, and other challenges.

The UNDP stressed that for households to be involved in taking action against HIV and AIDS, a supportive environment should be created in five main areas.

The first looked at reforming the development process to make it more supportive to HIV-affected households.

Ms Chirwa said the UNDP sought youths and women’s views on how the development process could be made more inclusive so that the weak in society could participate in it.

“The aim of UNDP is to consult the most affected groups on how HIV and AIDS should focus our thinking on removing the fault lines in our tools of development which often excluded the majority of the country’s population especially youths and women. Decisions were made in higher offices there,” she said.

She added that polices and laws should promote and protect the livelihood security of HIV-affected households and create an environment in which a future is assured for such households.

The second aspect looked at how to strengthen macro and medium level institutions to ensure that HIV and AIDS did not unravel their capacity to deliver on their mandates.

To this end, Ms Chirwa argued that although organisations responded to both external and internal risks posed by the pandemic, more needed to be done to help those organisations to refine their instruments to ensure that they were more supportive to households faced with HIV and AIDS.

Promoting an environment that allowed flourishing adaptive structures was another area that the UNPD discussion forum sought in its future Youth Friendly Version of the Zambia Human Development Report.

As Ms Chirwa put it, district and sub-district level structures which were closer to households and communities than macro and medium (meso) level organisations should be in the frontline in enhancing household capacities to respond to HIV and AIDS.

Ms Chirwa argued that at the core of that was the need to make Government officials accountable to the people, expand opportunities, for people’s participation and increase the chances of decisions taken to match as much as possible the aspirations of the people themselves.

Along side that, the UNDP called for measures that strengthened local authorities that had undergone serious dilapidation over the years.

Ms Chirwa added that the fourth area involved revitalizing structures and processes in social, institutional and organisational environments at community level to make them more supportive to HIV-affected households especially after getting their views on how they think their challenges should be addressed.

“This implies identifying, strengthening and promoting the positive elements within communities that could help HIV-affected households to make successful adjustments to the situation,” she added.

She said UNDP sought ways on how cultural norms and traditional structures based on social solidarity could be made to thrive once again.

Ms Chirwa said the fifth area looked at how HIV-affected households could be helped to rebuild their asset bases.

She added that livelihood assets such as human capital, financial capital, physical capital, social and natural capital were key for households response to HIV and AIDS.

Ms Chirwa further said a household would be said to have the capacity to respond to HIV and AIDS when it was able to effectively apply its resources (money, food, labour and the like) in order to access information on HIV\AIDS and take measures to prevent themselves and others against HIV infections.

And a youth, Clara Kalaba said HIV and AIDS prevalence was higher among young people and women because they were not empowered economically and socially.

Kalaba said most youths and women lacked meaningful sources of income to enable them with stand the challenges of poverty, which reciprocated into HIV\AIDS in many instances as those groups engaged themselves in risky behaviour for survival.

She called on youths and women to take interest in programmes that sought to improve their livelihood if real result were to be felt at household level.

She said programmes that engaged affected groups were rare, and youths should freely express themselves on how they would like to see those issues addressed both in the short and long run.

In Zambia, a number of initiatives were practiced in most parts of the country pertaining to the pandemic such as; home-based care, tackling psychological impacts of HIV and AIDS and the public declaration of people living with HIV\AIDS to fight stigma, but all these faced irresistible stamina of epidemic.

The new approach is worthy trying, it could be the way to reduce the prevalence rate in the country.