08 Aug 2022

Botswana has made substantial progress in reducing new HIV infections as first-hand infections declined by 46 per cent from 2010 to 2021.

Speaking in an interview UNAIDS Country director, Mr Alankar Malviya said Botswana had made  remarkable progress in reducing new infections among children since 2010 with an 82 per cent decline recorded.

Mr Malviya said the country surpassed the target for vertical transmission after breastfeeding at 2.21 per cent against a target of less than five per cent.

He said the success of the Prevention of Mother To Child Transmission (PMTCT) programme had made Botswana the first high-burden country to achieve silver status on the path to the elimination of vertical HIV transmission.

Despite the progress, he said, “reduction in new HIV infections has been slow and needs to be accelerated if we are to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030.”

Mr Malviya said those overall national achievements tended to obscure the slower progress in preventing new infections among population groups such as adolescent girls and women, gay men who have sex with other men/LGBTQI, and sex workers.

Moreover, he said women and girls were disproportionately affected by HIV, accounting for 71 per cent of new HIV in 2021, adding that the new infections were three times higher among adolescent girls and young women (15 - 24 years) than among men of the same age.

Furthermore, he said since 2010 Botswana had registered a steeper decline in new infections among adolescent boys and young men (72 per cent) compared to adolescent girls and young women (49 per cent) or older women with only a 30 per cent reduction.

He said the age of consent for HIV testing and Sexual Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) services, lack of access to youth-friendly services, lack of condoms in schools, and sexuality education were all impeding efforts to fully access HIV services.

Mr Malviya stated that the implementation and scale-up of the five-year (2019 – 2023) National Programming Framework for Adolescents and Young People and Key Populations would be key to bridging that gap.

“Key populations have a relatively higher risk of acquiring HIV as shown by the results of the 2017 Integrated Behavioral Biological and Surveillance Survey (IBBSS) study in Botswana, where female sex workers had an HIV prevalence of 42.8 per cent and HIV incidence of 2.9 per cent which is 2.6 times higher than the incidence among adult women (1.12 percent, 2017),” he said.

Men who have sex with other men have an HIV incidence of 2.1 per cent, five times higher than adult male HIV incidence, he said. 

Therefore, Mr Malviya said UNAIDS commended Botswana for the historic decision to decriminalise same-sex sexual relations following a court of appeal judgement in November 2021.

“Botswana is the second country in Africa to decriminalise same-sex relations in November 2021 after South Africa in 1999,” he said.

However, he said laws that criminalised sex work continued to undermine efforts to reach and link sex workers to national HIV response programs. ends