HIV Care and Treatment
(6 districts – Masvingo, Chivi, Chiredzi, Mwenezi, Gutu, Zaka)
Year Kapnek supported 744 PMTCT sites in 31 districts located in six of the ten national provinces. Over the years, Kapnek has supported the piloting of the feasibility of providing PMTCT services in Zimbabwe in Epworth, the geographical expansion of single-dose Nevirapine (sd-NVP) regimens, MER 28, MER 14 and Option B+.
2017 was the fifth year of a five-year grant from USAID (to our lead partner OPHID Trust), but the consortium was granted a two-year no-cost extension which took us until late 2019. This resulted in new and expanded activities rather than a final year closing down of the project. We continued our HIV Care and Treatment support to health facilities in the 10 districts in Midlands (4 districts) and Masvingo (6 districts). We support the highest volume health facilities working across all departments, testing adults as well as children and getting them linked to ART and follow-up care. The key targets were based on the global 90/90/90 framework for the HIV cascade: the number of people to be tested, the numbers to be found positive and the numbers initiated on ART, targets that were set by USAID/PEPFAR for each health facility. One of the key strategies to achieve the targets was the hiring of Direct Service Delivery nurses, these being nurses trained to do testing for HIV and initiation onto ART as well as giving the requisite counseling. In 2017 Kapnek hired additional DSD nurses, to supplement the MoHCC workforce and worked closely with the Provincial Medical Directors in both provinces to ensure that this was done smoothly and in line with MoHCC plans.
Initiating HIV+ clients onto treatment has remained a challenge. From October 2017, Kapnek started supporting all health facilities in the 9 districts, which we expect to help find some of
the HIV+ clients who had previously been hard to find and lost to follow-up.
In October 2020 JF Kapnek Trust embarked on a new 5-year HIV Care and Treatment
program as a sub-recipient to the Organisation for Public Health and Development
(OPHID).