Born Free of HIV in West Africa

With your support GAIA has completed the renovation of its maternity ward! See pictures attached and glow with pride! We raised sufficient funds to build two new delivery rooms, replace the tiles and paint the walls. We hope that this will improve our ability to provide care and strengthen the good rapport between the clinic staff and the mothers. Thank you!

We are still assessing the impact of our PMTCT - Prevention from Mother to Child Transmission - Program. For that we did a pilot evaluation last spring and continued the assessment in December.

So far the data looks very good: In the past five years over 6,000 women have been tested, and more than 140 HIV positive women have been given medications to prevent HIV transmission to their babies. And where we were able to provide care for the women, their babies are still HIV negative. The babies that are HIV positive were infected before they came to the clinic, or because their moms left after receiving the positive HIV test, the main cause being stigma. The program has more than 40 children of HIV+ mothers enrolled in regular follow-up and 100% of the babies whose moms successfully took the medication are HIV negative to date!