The National HIV/AIDS Commission must be reorganised to properly address the needs of Barbadians who depend on the organisation to live quality lives, says Minister of People Empowerment and Elder Affairs Kirk Humphrey.
“We have to restructure the HIV/AIDS Commission. Things have changed but I did not want to convey the impression to anybody that as part of that restructuring, we would get smaller,” he said at a research symposium held on Friday at Radisson Aquatica Resort in Aquatic Gap, St Michael.
“In fact, the opposite is true – that as we now lead in this fight against HIV/AIDS, the unit has to become bigger . . . . We need to do more things, we need to focus and we need to get priority back onto this HIV fight and this HIV cause . . . . In many ways, I thought we’d become a little too quiet actually.”
Humphrey added that the government alone could not do what is required to change the landscape of HIV/AIDS in Barbados, pointing out that it would also entail the support of the community.
“You cannot build any meaningful policy of any kind that is not built on the people who are either experiencing it, working with it, or dealing with it in one way or the other,” he said.
“The tragedy for most policies is that we talk about these things and we exclude the very people who are supposed to be involved in the fight, and it makes no sense. And so we end up with a lot of policies on paper that do nothing to advance the interests of people. We have to be able to change that and to make sure that policies make sense.”
Back in August, the minister disclosed that the commission would be converted into a Non-Communicable Disease (NCD) Unit stating that HIV/AIDS could be treated in the same way that any non-communicable disease was.
On Friday, reiterating the importance of making that move, Humphrey said it would help address the issues associated with the stigma of HIV and AIDS.
“HIV, being a sexually transmitted disease, continues to carry a stigma and that stigma is perhaps the bigger burden, in many ways, than the disease itself. It is related to the history of disease. Many people hear about HIV and AIDS and they cast their minds back – their judgemental minds – to homosexual males, particularly black males and that this disease is for that audience only. Well, even if it were so, so what? . . .
So men and women who refuse to have conversations about HIV and AIDS carry their minds back to the time when we were ignorant about the disease and allow that ignorance to determine their actions today, which in itself is ignorant. And therefore, we have to be able to fight stigma,” he stressed.
“One thing that is sad is that we continue, regrettably, to be a society that judges people; that is a judgement that is reserved for the Lord. And in our judgement, we deny people the opportunity to benefit from all that Barbados has to offer.
“We speak of growth, we speak of development, but that development is a distorted development so that not everybody benefits from the development. Or we speak of growth but that growth is not inclusive, so everybody is not allowed to be able to participate in the growth of the country. It cripples the country, it cripples the capacity of the people who are involved in this fight to be able to lead, and it cripples the quality of life of the persons that we are trying to serve; and Barbados has to do a lot better than that,”
Humphrey said.
The theme for World AIDS Day 2023, which is internationally recognised on December 1, is Let Communities Lead.
In a welcome address, Director of the National HIV/AIDS Commission Lynn Armstong said the theme highlights the invaluable contributions of communities, grassroots organisations, and support and advocacy groups in raising awareness, providing care and treatment support, and addressing the stigma linked to HIV.
“It further accentuates the need for participatory and inclusive approaches which put affected communities in the vanguard of decision-making, policy formulations and intervention development and implementation,” she said. (SZB)
