12 Mar 2014

Principal youth officer in the Ministry of Lands and Housing (MLH), Ms Masego Madimabe has said working youth are often left behind on issues affecting young people in general.

Addressing the MLH youth during the Month of Youth Against AIDS (MYAA) commemoration in Francistown Tuesday, March 11, Ms Madimabe said often when issues of HIV/AIDS were addressed among the youth, the focus was usually on the out of school and unemployed youth while employed youth, despite being within the target group were left behind.

She noted that working working youth, despite having access to a lot of information and awareness messages, were also vulnerable and would often not share their problems because they were afraid of how society would perceive them.

It was against this background that, the ministry was working on creating a favourable environment in which employed youth could be empowered. Ms Madimabe highlighted cohabitation and issues of Multiple Concurrent Partners (MCP’s) as some of the major factors in the spread of the virus, were overlooked among the employed youth..

Meanwhile, the district HIV/AIDS officer, Mr Thatayaone Maithamako lamented that their clinical records for the months of October, November and December 2013 indicated that people were still engaging in unprotected sex, noting they recorded a total of 5278 cases of Sexual Transmitted Infections (STI’s) in that period alone.

And from the number 3342 of the patients were women. This, he said, was an alarming record particularly because awareness messages were availed almost every time to sensitise people about the risks of being infected with STI’s.

He called on the employed youth to take advantage of platforms made available to them to protect themselves from contacting the virus, adding some of their peers looked to them as role models and as such they should lead by example in the fight against the epidemic, Ends