Kenya's Success in Controlling AIDS is Example for Africa

In its recently released annual report on the global AIDS epidemic, the United Nations lowered its estimates of the numbers of people infected worldwide by 6.5 million. The U.N. says most of the decline reflects changes in the methodology for measuring the extent of the disease. But as Derek Kilner reports for VOA from Nairobi, Kenya stood out as one of the few cases where there has been a genuine easing of the epidemic.

New figures show that the percentage of people in Kenya living with the AIDS virus fell to 5.1 percent in 2006, down from 5.9 percent a year earlier and 9 percent in the mid-1990s.
The government's efforts are visible in the number of Kenyans receiving antiretroviral treatment, which grew from 3,000 in 2002 to 118,000 in 2006. Similarly, over 400,000 people received voluntary counseling and testing, or VCT, in 2006, up from only 1,000 seven years ago.
Boaz Cheluget, head of monitoring and evaluation at Kenya's National AIDS Control Council, says one of the main reasons Kenya has been able to translate the attention and money into successful programs is that the country's work force is highly skilled.
"Kenya has an advantage," said said Cheluget. "I think the quality of staff and service provision in any sector is high, and so when we introduce something the implementation is of quality. I have been to many countries, and I can see there are quite a lot of gaps in terms of skilled workforce, in terms of performance, in terms of governance."
Cheluget says the country's high literacy rate also contributes to the success of projects implemented at the local level.

In the run-up to World AIDS Day on December 1, Kenya has been holding a number of events to encourage testing. Patrick Obath, managing director for Shell Oil in Kenya, was one of the many business leaders participating at one such event in Nairobi on November 26.
"We have had HIV/AIDS programs at work since 2002. We have had a policy which was piloted at Kenya Shell and has now been adopted globally by Shell. And in the last three years when we have had VCTs at work, we have had about a 98 percent uptake," said Obath.
Education efforts have also expanded recently, bolstered by the introduction of free primary education in 2003, and the corresponding rise in school attendance. General knowledge of HIV in Kenya is now nearly universal.