Mothers2Mothers

Today I had a privilege to participate Wellness Center facilitating one Mothers2Mothers group session in Nhlangano rural clinic in Southern Swaziland. Since 2008 Mothers2Mothers has preventewd mothers to child transmission, provided access to medical care for mothers, educated, supported, and empowered mothers living with HIV to keep themselves and their children healthy and overcome social stigma to live positive and productive life. Today the project has more than 80 Mentor Mothers around the country providing one-on-one and group sessions for pregnant women living with HIV advising them about how to keep themselves healthy and what steps they can take to have a healthy HIV-free baby. Since 2001 M2M has expanded to 7 Sub-Saharan African countries with a total of 405 sites and 712 Mentor Mothers. In Swaziland only there are 57 sites and 82 Mentor Mothers at work reaching approximately 75% of HIV+ mothers . http://www.m2m.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/swaziland.html

Mentor Mothers live with HIV themselves and are trained to provide life-saving health education and psychosocial support and network to their peers. Mentor Mothers are role models in their communities, putting a face to empowered, strong, and healthy HIV-positive women. Mentor Mothers are powerful agents against the stigma of HIV that causes women to live in fear and prevents them from seeking care. This month Wellness Center travels around the country talking about disclosure of HIV status to loved ones. Joining the group session and discussion of Mentor Mothers helped to get a picture of the main challenges in terms of disclosure, stigma and culture around the disease, since many mothers are ashamed and frightened to tell their status to their families and friends.

Good results are gained: Women who visited a mothers2mothers site multiple times for education and support were more likely to receive anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) than women not coming to mothers2mothers. M2M mothers are also more likely to have disclosed their HIV status to others. Disclosure of status makes women more likely to take ARVs. Women who take ARVs are less likely to infect their babies. Mothers who attend m2m are more likely to deliver their babies in health care facilities than mothers who do not attend m2m. Mothers who attend m2m have high rates of getting CD4 counts, a measure of immunity and an indicator of AIDS. Mothers with AIDS who attend m2m are highly likely to get life-sustaining ARVs. The Mentor Mothers themselves were very optimistic big amount of HIV positive mothers can be covered through their work. Mothers are followed by Mentors for 2 years and Mentors do their best to improve the quality of life of their peers.