Core Services

1.1 Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT)

• The objectives of having Voluntary Counselling and Testing as one of the services offered by KEBA AFRICA are:
• The opportunity for people to get to know their HIV status
• Promoting behavioural change, discouraging high-risk behaviours
• Creating awareness and correcting misconceptions
• Facilitating early referral of positive cases to health centers for treatment
• To serve as a means to measure behaviour patterns and signs for HIV and STD prevalence
• To stem up the campaign against stigmatisation and discrimination
• Promoting love and care to people living with HIV/AIDS
• Promoting condom use
• Drawing people closer to the reality of the HIV/AIDS epidemic

The importance of VCT is to make the test as accessible as possible and to encourage people to use it whenever they believe they have taken a sexual risk. Taken the HIV test means facing up to reality and seeing whether one is positive or negative. This gives rise to follow-up for people with HIV, while for those that are HIV negative the test must be used to strengthen their determination to avoid risks. Unlike screening that takes place without a person’s knowledge, a voluntary counselling and testing can be used to give people a sense of responsibility and mobilising them. Carried out properly and based on sound professional HIV/AIDS counselling ethics, VCT thus becomes a weapon in the fight against HIV/AIDS, as the juncture between prevention and care. But achieving this feat requires dealing with some obstacles and organizing good conditions for telling people their HIV status.

Voluntary counselling and testing in 2008 covered forty (10) sites across the nation. These are: CFAO, SHELL GHANA LTD, Royal Dutch Embassy,

KEBA AFRICA in partnership with GSMF did a lot of outreach programmes to ascertain attitudes, beliefs, risk perception and knowledge about HIV/AIDS among transport operators and the community that they interact constantly with. The project objectives were to increase the number of drivers, hawkers, chopbar operators and passengers who use condom with non-regular partners; increase the number of audience members who know the symptoms and source of teatment of STIs and its link to HIV transmission; decrease the number of sexual partners of the target group, increase the risk perception of the target group and embark on an aggressive VCT programme for all drivers, mates, hawkers, traders as well as commercial sex workers.

The Outreach Programs and VCTs conducted in 2007/08 have been in cooperation with several of our partners, among them being the Ghana AIDS Commission, the Ghana Social Marketing Foundation (GSMF), and CFAO GHANA LTD.