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 Home Overseas Projects Southern Africa Project History
Recent Years 2000-2005: Projects on HIV
- Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions
- COSATU
- South African Rural Women
- APHEDA & the struggle against Apartheid
Sth African mineworkers at HIV awareness event
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Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions
In 2000 Union Aid Abroad - APHEDA was able to begin a project to support the activities of the national HIV program of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. Zimbabwe had already been heavily burdened by HIV for 15 years, and workers in particular were increasingly losing colleagues and fellow union members to disease. From 1997, and particularly from 2001, the political and economic chaos unleashed by the Mugabe regime plunged working people in Zimbabwe into terrible poverty and repression. This project provided training for the national and regional officers of the affiliate unions, training for union negotiators, peer counselors, women's officers and married couples (as resource people on behaviour change for their unions). The project aimed at reinforcing behaviour change education for workers in Zimbabwe, at integrating HIV within occupational health, at piloting worklplace care and support services for working families affected by HIV, at developing good union and sectoral policies on HIV and workers, at minimizing discrimination, at "treatments literacy" and agitating for widespread access to antiretroviral medications.
COSATU
With the two million-member Congress of South African Trade Unions, Union Aid Abroad - APHEDA, with AusAID funding, implemented a two-year education project on HIV primary strengthening the capacities of shop stewards in affiliated unions to take forward the struggle against AIDS. This means developing and knowing the policy of the union on HIV and being able to take that into negotiations with employers, it means understanding the situation of the members with HIV and being able to offer peer support and counselling, educating members and their families to promote maintenance of safe practices, protecting worker solidarity and dispelling stigma and myths, and mobilizing workers to fight for access to HIV treatments. The project produced 30,000 copies of a training manual for shop stewards on all issues relating to HIV and the workplace. APHEDA had begun support to the HIV education and policy program of COSATU in 1990, within our overall support to developing occupational health and safety capacities within the democratic union movement in South Africa prior to the overthrow of Apartheid.
South African Rural Women
In 2000 we began a partnership with the National Movement of Rural Women (NMRW), one of the historic pillars of the struggle against Apartheid, representing the millions of landless women cut off from breadwinners, cities and means of income generation in the forced removals of the 1970s and 80s. The organisation, with its 3,000 local income generating groups, was becoming alarmed that their women members did not have the skills and knowledge to deal with their children and grandchildren coming home, retired from work, sick with AIDS. Unfortunately the parent body, the Movement of Rural Women. Faced organisational collapse, and the HIV project, supported by AusAID, was housed with the national Women's Health project, and subsequently a successor organisation to MRW, the Rural Communities Development Programme, headed by Boitumelo Seabi and Mary-Jane Maake.
The project worked in five impoverished rural areas, in the mining area around Brits in the North West Province, in Ermelo and Groblersdaal (former kwaNdebele) areas in Mpumalanga province, and in the Vryheid and Esctcort areas of KwaZulu-Natal province. The project supported autonomous local groups formed by MRW: Platinum Light Givers Aids Programme in Brits, Sizonqoba Community Organization Against HIV/AIDS in Ermelo, Moutse Health, Development Information Centre, near Groblersdaal, Lethimpilo Youth Organization and Sinethemba Community Organisation in Vryheid, and Tholimpilo Youth Organization in Estcort.
Winterveld Community HIV and Child Nutrition projects
Throughout the 1990s, APHEDA, with funding support form AusAID and local donors, implemented a series of projects with the community health structures in the township of the Winterveld, just north west of Pretoria. Winterveld was a squatter area with over half a million, which under Apartheid until 1994 had been deeply oppressed under the dictatorship of Lucas Mangope in the supposedly "independent" Bantustan of Boputhatswana. APHEDA was able to support the local clinics and volunteer health workers in educating the community about child nutrition, and in very innovative community AIDS education, home care and support efforts.
APHEDA & the struggle against Apartheid
For information about how Australian aid, Australian unions, and APHEDA, worked with the heroes of the anti-Apartheid struggle, in Australia and in southern Africa, see the article Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA: 20 years of working for freedom.
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