MINISTER of Health, Dr. Bheri Ramsaran, has challenged faith-based organisations to join the Health Ministry’s move to take the HIV/AIDS education programme to less privileged communities. The Minister threw the challenge out at the HIV Inter-faith gathering at the Umana Yana on Friday. “We are going south of the city,” Minister Ramsaran announced. “We are going to have the annual HIV Walk in one of our less privileged areas, Albouystown… Join NAPS and the Ministry of Health to celebrate the lives of those less fortunate and poorer sections of the population in that community and surroundings. Come march, come walk with us, so that we bring some of the enlightenment that we have brought to gatherings like this.”

Observing that the Ministry recognises the importance of activities supporting the efforts against HIV/AIDS, and their capacity to mobilise and get the message to those who most need it, the Health Minister said the Ministry is vigorously constructing relationships with wider sections of the community, and this has been a success over the past few years.

He noted that the strong bonds made through the leaders of faith-based organisations were enhanced through their co-operation with the National AIDS Programme Secretariat (NAPS).

He revealed that the Ministry of Health will be re-aligning resources, and pointed out that faith-based organisations will have a part to play. “We are in the chronic stages of the disease, having to recognise that we need to do the same work with probably less resources; and the Ministry of Health has already identified, which has been concurred by international donor agencies, that efforts have to be made in particularly vulnerable groups, those which are called ‘the most at-risk groups’, while at the same time maintaining our vigilance and not becoming complacent among the wider population.”
Minister Ramsaran noted that the groups of underprivileged youth coming together to play street football or cricket come from the vulnerable areas towards which help should be extended. “We are going to take the services to people who need them,” Minister Ramsaran said.

“Let’s go where the youth gather,” he urged. “At the football matches in the night, in the poorer sections of the community.”
Addressing directly representatives of the faith-based organisations, he pointed out how good it would look, “to have information available in the little barber shops around those communities…take that and bring the message to those small kiosks…where they cut their hair,” he told them.

The Minister added that there is also a need to recognise the continued needs of other vulnerable sections of the population, such as men who have sex with men, prisoners, and commercial sex workers. He pledged the Ministry’s continued good work among those groups. (GINA)