SAPTA is acronym for Support for Addiction Prevention and Treatment in Africa. It was founded with to provide educational programmes for addiction counsellors, running community based prevention programmes, advocacy for greater access to treatment, promotion of professionalism in the addiction field through strengthening and capacity building for treatment centres and provision of outpatient treatment facilities.
Some of SAPTA’s current and previous funders include Ford Foundation, AED, USAID/Pathfinder International under Aphia II and Aphia plus Nairobi and Mombasa, American Fund for AIDS Research (AMFAR)(, SAPTA Foundation (USA), Kenya Community Development Foundation (KCDF) and CHF International.
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis has now joined the list of SAPTA’s greatest funders. The funding has been given to SAPTA to increase the number of women who deliver in health facilities (following referrals from community health workers) and to increase the number of injecting drug users accessing HIV and AIDS prevention services in Nairobi. Under the grant a wellness centre will also be established in Nairobi’s Pangani area.
Some of the activities that will be going on at the wellness centre include community outreach events targeting people living with HIV, outreaches targeting pregnant women, outreaches targeting male involvement in preventing mother to child transmission, community outreaches targeting injecting drug users, HIV testing and counselling mobilisation and home visits.
The funding has come about after SAPTA learnt, through one of its Aphia-plus funded projects, that women and girls who use drugs have different needs from men who use drugs. For many reasons, women who use drugs are more likely than their male counterparts to acquire HIV. The stigma and discrimination that women who use drugs face increases the likelihood of engaging in behaviours that enhance vulnerability to HIV and other blood-borne viruses. Furthermore, women who use drugs face a range of gender specific barriers to accessing HIV-related services and in many regions continue to represent a hard-to-reach population, even where harm reduction programmes are in place.
This funding will be a big boost to SAPTA as it is going to tackle some of the challenges that we face on the ground such as getting free maternal health services to pregnant women who live on the streets, which should lead to a reduction in infant mortality rates for this group.
In the next few years through funding from Global Fund we will be able to raise the profile of these issues in order to advocate for change and to develop and support best practices for women who use drugs or are facing drug offences. It will also be a big boost to SAPTA’s aim to reach injecting drug users in Nairobi and their access to HIV and AIDS prevention services.
With all this funding from the Global Fund, Aphia-plus, CHF and KCDF, SAPTA hopes to attain its vision of a healthy society free from addictions.
