Sensitizing a Nation

Sandra Mubiana launched her first HIV-awareness initiative in 2004. She created a documentary about the Zambian government’s distribution of free anti-retroviral treatment (ART) for a video production class she enrolled in to further her journalism career.

When another course member showed her a pamphlet about the program, Sandra felt the urgency to get the word out. Zambia’s annual count of AIDS-related deaths had just peaked after steadily climbing for over a decade: More than 80,000 Zambians died of AIDS in 2003.

“At that time so many people were dying of HIV and AIDS, and helpless,” she explains. “Many people were not so much aware of anti-retrovirals. …So I wondered how many people knew about this [government program] because I’d never heard it on the news or the radio. …When I saw the brochure, I thought, maybe we can do something so that people know about it.”

Sandra was really impressed with the people she met working on the documentary. She decided she could do more and took a communications job with the Center for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ), the government agency coordinating the ART program. She was a quick study: Sandra was promoted twice in two years and even traveled to the United States in late 2007 to advocate for AIDS funding in Africa.

The new position exposed Sandra to the factors contributing to the epidemic in Zambia. Girls and women in Zambia face men’s dominance in sexual relationships, society’s common condonation of men’s extramarital affairs, men’s unwillingness to use condoms even in high-risk encounters, and men’s use of sexual violence and coercion. As a result, HIV prevalence is significantly higher among women (18 percent) than men (13 percent), and young women ages 14 to 19 are up to six times more likely to have HIV than their male peers.

“I don’t think [women] are really playing [a] leadership role,” says Sandra. “What I would like to see is that women begin to see themselves as people who contribute to society.”

Sandra worked closely with people living with HIV and AIDS to raise awareness via drama groups and radio programs on issues such as the importance of adhering to ART treatment. While the messages apply to both men and women, she strived to portray men and women as equal partners whenever possible.

In 2008, Sandra read about the Advancing Women’s Leadership and Advocacy for AIDS Action regional workshop in Nairobi, Kenya. She applied to the workshop to improve her advocacy and leadership skills, but she learned so much more.

When she returned from Nairobi, her supervisor noticed a difference right away and gave her significantly more responsibilities.

“There are other people in the team in similar positions to her for as long as she has been here who are quite good people,” her supervisor says. “But she seems to have done more, and [perhaps] you can attribute that to the fact that she’s had that training that the rest of the staff on the team have not had.”

Sandra says she improved her facilitation and communication skills from the techniques used during the workshop. She now uses specific techniques to generate frank discussion around sensitive topics such as sex and sexuality.

“You know, the issue of sex: It’s taboo to talk about that openly, but we know at the same time that these are issues that, if not handled carefully, they bring HIV.”

Sandra also credits the workshop with helping her to deal with the inevitable conflict that arises when dealing with such sensitive topics.

“I learned something on how you can prevent conflict...being proactive...how you can manage it when it comes, and how you can transform it when it comes, learning new things from it and also moving forward,” she says.

In addition to her new responsibilities, Sandra has taken the initiative to identify gaps in her organization and to make improvements where possible. She has pushed for a more formalized effort to monitor and evaluate CIDRZ’s programs and developed a survey to assess accessibility to information and to better understand the information people wanted.

“Previously we just implemented and implemented but we [didn’t] sit down to reflect [on] whether it was working,” Sandra explains.

This idea for a survey made a big impression on her colleagues.

“It is here that I can say I’ve seen Sandra bloom,” says Sandra’s supervisor. “She had a very good sense of where we were going.”

Sandra says the workshop experience catalyzed a shift in her approach to work, benefiting not only herself, but also the organization and the communities where she works.

“I came back a different person, because I was just so confident about myself knowing that as a woman, I can contribute to my country,” says Sandra.

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