Zimbabwe - access to medicines powered by foreign aid
In September 2017, I was fortunate to visit Zimbabwe as part of the Unitaid NGO delegation. Unitaid, an entity under the World Health Organisation, works on equitable access to quality health technologies worldwide, and it does this by providing grants to organisations with reputable financial track records working on the ground in-country. On the 13th, I visited a village in Mazowe, about an hours’ drive away from the capital of Harare, to learn from community-based distributors (or CBDAs) of HIV self-testing kits. The kits are the OraQuick tests which works with a sample collected from rubbing one's gums with the diagnostic device provided, and it returns a result within 10 minutes. These test kits, salaries of CBDAs, and tablets to record HIV results, are funded by Unitaid. In this picture I took in Mazowe (right), you can see a CBDA explaining to a couple how the HIV self-test works. What struck me was how extremely well trained she was, and she managed to convince