Partnership on HIV/AIDS and Mobile Populations in Southern Africa

The programme focuses on a variety of workers that are mobile because of their profession. However, the programme believes it is not effective to focus on individuals without addressing the context and environment in which they live and work. Therefore, even though the programme concentrates primarily on a few selected sectors and the migrant workers employed in each sector, activities also focus on population groups with whom they interact and institutions that may alleviate or facilitate an environment of HIV vulnerability. Sectors that are selected by PHAMSA include construction, transport, commercial agriculture, fisheries, mining, and cross-border informal trade.

PHAMSA has four distinct, yet inter-related, components:

1. Advocacy for Policy Development:PHAMSA lobbies National AIDS Councils (NACs), SADC, and United Nations (UN) partners to integrate population mobility and migration in their national strategic plans on HIV and AIDS, regional HIV plans, and UN Development Assistance Frameworks (UNDAFs). PHAMSA also assists policy makers and other partners in the construction, transport, commercial agriculture, and fisheries sectors to develop regional policies on HIV. Advocacy on issues related to population mobility and HIV is also conducted by actively working with partners from the print and broadcast media who present stories on the complex relationship between migration, population mobility, and the spread of HIV.
2. Research: Links between population mobility and HIV are investigated with a focus on concurrent sexual partnerships and sexual networking patterns. PHAMSA also proactively engages with the research community in southern Africa to integrate migration and mobility in (public) health courses and health/HIV issues in migration courses.
3. Technical Cooperation and Regional Coordination: PHAMSA strengthens the links between IOM’s HIV programmes in Africa, facilitating quality control, coordination, and a consistency of programming approach to HIV and mobility. PHAMSA supports provision of technical assistance on HIV and population mobility to national and regional partners and integrates these issues in training programmes, information, education, and communication (IEC) materials, and other relevant interventions. PHAMSA also actively facilitates information sharing and increased networking between strategic partners through workshops and study visits.
4. Capacity Building: PHAMSA aims to test the capacity building model, developed during the first phase of its work, in selected migrant sending and receiving sites in the region. The model is designed to provide practical examples and “know-how” on implementing the recommendations set out in the SADC/IOM guidelines. It does this by facilitating both technical and organisational capacity building of NGO partners to effect behaviour and social change and to share project challenges and successes between the different NGOs regionally. In addition, the capacity building model will be evaluated and documented. On the basis of this research, a toolkit will be developed that can be used to replicate the model in other migrant sending and receiving sites in the region.

HIV/AIDS.

Within sub-Saharan Africa, the countries of southern Africa are the worst affected by the HIV epidemic. A number of different factors have been advanced to explain why HIV and AIDS are particularly affecting southern Africa. They include poverty and economic marginalisation; high rates of STIs and other opportunistic infections; sexual networking and patterns of sexual contact, including high levels of concurrent sexual partners; the absence of male circumcision; and the role of at-risk groups, such as commercial sex workers. Related to some of these causes and perhaps explaining the rapid spread of HIV over the last decade is population mobility. Population mobility and migration especially contribute to the phenomenon of concurrent sexual partnerships, which is arguably one of the main drivers of the HIV epidemic in Southern Africa. Because migrants and mobile workers are regularly separated from their permanent partners, they are more inclined to engage in short- or long-term sexual relations with other partners.

The evidence confirms that migrants and migrant households are particularly at risk. There is a higher rate of HIV infection in “communities of the mobile”, which often include socially, economically, and politically marginalised people. There are at least three key ways in which mobility is tied to the spread of HIV:

1. Mobility per se can encourage or make people vulnerable to high-risk sexual behaviour;
2. Mobility makes people more difficult to reach, whether for prevention education, condom provision, HIV testing, or post-infection treatment and care; and
3. Migrants’ multi-local social networks create opportunities for sexual networking.

PHAMSA was developed to align with the overall objectives and strategic areas of focus of the SADC HIV/AIDS Strategic Framework and Programme of Action (2003-2007). It aims to contribute to the strategic areas of "Policy Development and Harmonisation" and "Facilitating Resource Network", identified as priorities within the SADC HIV/AIDS Strategic Framework.