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Sex workers abandoned as COVID crackdowns undo Africa’s HIV efforts

“We expect many more new cases of HIV to be reported in the coming months and weeks,” says Thomas Abol, executive director of Keeping Alive Society’s Hope (KASH), a Kenyan group that serves sex workers and men who have sex with men. UNAIDS and the World Health Organization (WHO) have sounded similar alarms. 

Under the Nairobi government’s COVID-19 restrictions, KASH closed its drop-in centre – a safe space in Kisumu for people who may not feel safe going to a regular clinic, such as sex workers and LGBTIQ people. It offers HIV testing, counselling, doctor consultations, PrEP and monthly antiretroviral drug refills. `

In South Africa, Megan Lessing, spokesperson for the NGO Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT), says that their outreach work – going into communities to talk to sex workers where they live and work – and their walk-in HIV clinic stopped for the first five weeks of lockdown.

Lessing describes how government officials removed sex workers who were living on the street in Cape Town, including many trans sex workers, and put them into a shelter far from support services. After a public outcry, the shelter was closed, but many sex workers are too scared to go back to their usual working areas.

Even before the pandemic, the five countries were registering nearly 620,000 new HIV infections in total per year, according to WHO data from 2018. “People are going to die! Aids is going to multiply!” Namiiro warns.

In ten other African countries, similar reductions in HIV services were reported to an International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) survey of its network of sexual and reproductive health clinics, in March.

Abandoned, without food or financial assistance

Sex workers say that while the risk of COVID-19 infection has scared off many of their clients, they still can’t stop working, to observe the health advice on social distancing. In all five countries, sex workers said they have not benefited from the official cushions meant to tide people over the coronavirus restrictions.

For example, sex work is illegal in South Africa, so sex workers are unable to claim unemployment benefits. “I have applied for the one-off relief of R350 ($24) that the government announced for unemployed people, but so far I’ve got nothing,” said a sex worker in Cape Town.

In Uganda, health authorities identified cross-border truck drivers as ‘importers’ of coronavirus and warned sex workers off them. Truckers are a major client group for sex workers at border points and along the transit routes in the region. 

Macklean Kyomya, who runs Alliance of Women Advocating for Change (AWAC), a member organisation of 10,000 sex workers in Uganda, says that the government refused a request for food aid from the sex workers. 

“We were asked to disclose the number of individuals in every district and their names and contact information,” she says, although the Ugandan authorities weren’t clear on why they needed this information. Knowing that these same authorities had previously conducted raids on sex workers to enforce the “no contact with truckers” directive, Kyome did not reveal these identities. The food aid was denied. 

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Lydia Namubiru Kerry Cullinan Khatondi Soita Wepukhulu | Radio Free (2020-06-05T08:20:23+00:00) Sex workers abandoned as COVID crackdowns undo Africa’s HIV efforts. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/05/sex-workers-abandoned-as-covid-crackdowns-undo-africas-hiv-efforts/

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