The Compassion AIDS Initiative provides the additional care that Compassion sponsored children and families with HIV/AIDS need. The programme is based around; Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitative Care.

If you are a current sponsor you can increase your monthly donations to support the Compassion AIDS Initiative

Download the Compassion AIDS Initiative brochure (Size 1.3MB) to find out more.

Each day, 6,000 new HIV infections occur in young people of 15 to 24 years of age. Simple education could help prevent many of these infections from occurring, which is why, within Compassion’s church based programmes, young people get to hear the real facts about AIDS.

Within age appropriate classes in a Christian context, drama, songs, informal discussions and personal testimonies from those infected with HIV/AIDS are used to educate students.

A further, 2,000 babies are born into the world with HIV already flowing in their blood because of HIV infection in their mothers. Sadly, up to 90 percent of these infections in newborns are preventable.

Compassion’s Child Survival Programmes support mothers with HIV to ensure that simple health practices reduce mother to child transmissions and give more children the chance of life.

Through local churches education on HIV/AIDS can reach an even wider sector of the community. This helps to banish myths, break down stigma and ensure that well informed people can make good decisions about their health.

Surprisingly, the greatest challenge is not in delivering pills, building clinics, or hiring doctors. Voluntary HIV testing is available and encouraged for all children and their families. The challenge is in identifying children and families in need, earning their trust, and motivating them to receive care.

The local church is a proven, replicable model to deliver care to the vulnerable and ensure that infected children and their families receive the ongoing support. This includes the provision of Antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), medication for the other opportunitistic diseases, nutritious food and household supplies.

It also includes the environment in which the care is administered. It’s in providing loving encouragement and ongoing motivation to a nine-year-old girl who lost her parents to AIDS; it’s in training those responsible for her care and removing anything that discourages her from making that regular trip to the clinic to get her supply of medicine, or from taking her next dose even though she hates the taste.

Many of the children in our care have lost parents, caregivers or siblings to this dreadful disease. Coupled with the grief of loss, they often have to deal with the stigma attached to their status or bear the weight of extra responsibility within the family.

Meeting the emotional and psychological needs of children is as important as ensuring that their physical needs are met. If children have been orphaned, Compassion ensures that they have a loving caregiver who can provide them with love and stability within a safe environment. By visiting families regularly, Compassion staff provide additional spiritual and emotional support.

For other children, the infection of their mother or father often results in loss of employment and income. Provision of basic resources and help in finding new employment is just one way Compassion can help to ease the burden on families.

Demonstrating God’s love is essential and Compassion church partners are safe havens where condemnation and discrimination are replaced by love and unconditional acceptance. When God enters troubled lives He can bring miraculous healing.

Download the Compassion AIDS Initiative brochure (Size 1.3MB)