New agreement with USAID on HIV/AIDS

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New agreement with USAID on HIV/AIDS

6:32 CAT | 16 Nov 2018

Picture: Supplied

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on Thursday signed an agreement under which it will grant 500,000 US dollars to the Mozambican National AIDS Council (CNCS) to strengthen the systems responding to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Scheduled to last for a year, this agreement is said to be another chapter in the long partnership between the CNCS and USAID, intended to strengthen the skills and capacities of the CNCS to plan and coordinate the national response to HIV and AIDS.

The USAID Director in Mozambique, Jennifer Adams, said that when the Mozambican government established a new constitutional authority for the CNCS in 2017, and given its heavy responsibility for coordinating the response to HIV and AIDS, the opportunity is arising to improve support for a broad and multi-sector response, focusing on communities.

“We have had great successes and we also face difficult challenges”, said Adams. “Today we are supporting great initiatives that will make a difference in the lives of people, changing the way in which we are giving our support, and helping this country contain the HIV and AIDS epidemic”.

She praised the “vision, determination and efforts” shown by the CNCS Executive Secretary, Francisco Mbofana, in leading the response to the disease.

“This is the vision we wish to support, the vision of having a stronger leadership on HIV at all levels of communities and districts, the vision of coordinated platforms that plan and monitor all activities related with preventing and treating HIV”, Adams said.

For his part, Mbofana said the Thursday agreement is a continuation of what the two institutions have been doing for a long time. “We shall take a new step in our collaboration which will be long and lasting. We shall continue consolidating our collaboration, for without it we cannot achieve our common goals”.

Those common goals, he continued, include controlling the epidemic within Mozambique, and hence contributing to controlling the epidemic internationally.

The project will strengthen the technical capacities of the HIV/AIDS focal points in 14 Mozambican government ministries, and in 15 district councils in Cabo Delgado, Niassa, Sofala and Inhambane provinces, in terms of planning, monitoring and assessing the response to the epidemic.

Each province will have three focal districts, which will receive material support in equipment such as computers, printers, scanners, office furniture and vehicles.

Source: AIM