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AMDEC - ENGLISHAMDEC, Government and Community Health Committees discuss impact of CLM project and challenges for the future
AMDEC, the Government and the Community Health Committees met for the evaluation and closure of the Community-Led Monitoring (CLM) project on 31 October and 1 November in Magude and Campoane-Boane, respectively.
Funded by PEPFAR, and implemented from March to October 2022, the MLC aimed to empower communities to know their rights and use them to identify, denounce and/or solve barriers (including influencing laws and systems), guaranteeing an improvement in antiretroviral treatment (ART) retention rates and health indicators in Mozambique. Over the course of its implementation, the project has benefited more than 2,500 health centre users, the majority of whom are people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV).
In Mozambique, despite notable progress in access to care and treatment, adherence and retention, with an emphasis on ART adherence, is still a major challenge. At present, the strategies and interventions implemented in the national health system (NHS) to improve adherence and retention in care and treatment are centred on active search activities for patients who fail or abandon treatment. Users' rights are often not respected, and the lack of knowledge and evidence about such actions makes services difficult to access, not very humanised and lacking in quality. One of the most visible aspects of this is the abandonment of treatment by PLHIV and Key People due to discrimination.
PEPFAR estimates that in the fourth quarter of 2019, 59% or approximately 1,354,408 people living with HIV were on antiretroviral treatment (ART). For certain populations, treatment coverage is much lower than average, such as adolescent boys and young men having 45% treatment coverage.
