Summaries of HIV/AIDS Projects in Africa
Working with ELCA World Hunger Program Partners

Zimbabwe—HIV/AIDS Health Education Program

Partners: ELCA and Evangelical Lutheran Church In Zimbabwe

DESCRIPTION:

Health care and education have always been a major concern for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Zimbabwe. The Church runs four hospitals as well as being responsible for all clinics in the Mberengwa District and many clinics in the Gwanda District. The ELCZ is in the forefront in the provision of health and medical care in the vast districts of Mberengwa and Gwanda. The Church is also dominant in the Beitbridge District although it does not run a hospital or clinic in that district.

The program intends to meaningfully involve the Church and the communities it serves by creating an acute awareness on the part of the leadership of the Church, so that they can use the local church platform to train and involve the community in the Church’s deaconal ministry, and to teach and warn, particularly, the young generation on the dangers of behaving in ways that will result in them contracting HIV/AIDS.

OBJECTIVES:

• To enable the pastors, Evangelist and lay congregational leaders to learn the basic facts about HIV/AIDS and its social, economic and political impact on Zimbabwe and Africa as a whole.

• To provide short and intensive clinical pastoral education courses which focus on the care and counseling of victims of the deadly epidemic.

• To equip these community leaders so that they can inform and train members of their congregations/communities on the caring and counseling of HIV/AIDS victims in their homes.

• To conduct research and identify orphans in the communities served by the Church and develop community based strategies to care for them.

• To help clarify Church policy, approach and participation in government and other ecumenical programs relating to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

• To promote an awareness, particularly among the youth, on how HIV is transmitted.

• To establish home-based care centers attached to all the ELCZ hospitals for AIDS and other terminally ill patients.

• To identify concrete ways to care for the many orphaned children in their communities.

Projects: Burkina Faso Cameroon Ethiopia Kenya Liberia Madagascar Mali Niger Nigeria Senegal Sierra Leone South Africa Tanzania Uganda
Other African Projects