Zimbabwe’s HIV gains face a test among young people

Résumé détaillé

New prevention tools offer hope, but reaching young people remains a challenge.

Harare, Zimbabwe – When Shaun Moyo started nursing at Parirenyatwa Hospital in Harare in the late 1990s, the effects of the HIV epidemic were visible in the hospital wards and beyond them. Patients filled the wards, she recalls, while funerals had become a familiar part of everyday life.

Nearly three decades later, the picture has changed. Antiretroviral treatment has transformed the lives of people living with HIV. Condoms, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) and other prevention options also give young people more ways to protect themselves.

But Moyo, now a 48-year-old nurse working locum shifts at two major public hospitals in Harare, worries that some young people may not fully appreciate the risks.

Her concern reflects a wider challenge for Zimbabwe: how to protect hard-won progress against HIV while ensuring that young people understand, can access and are willing to use the prevention tools available to them.

Dr Misheck Ruwende, a Zimbabwean family physician and advocate for reducing HIV stigma, shares that concern. In a public address on Twitter in September, followed online by Al Jazeera, members of the public and other local journalists, Ruwende warned that the country risked losing some of the gains made over decades.

“The sad part is that this is coming at a time we have the best options to prevent HIV, from rapid testing, PrEP, condoms, PEP to injectables,” Ruwende said.

“It wasn’t like that in the late 90s to early 2000s. It looks like we are now reversing all this huge success we had notched in recent times,” he added.

The scale of Zimbabwe’s progress is clear in the national figures. UNAIDS estimates that annual new HIV infections fell from 79,000 in 2010 to 15,000 in 2023. Among people aged 15 to 24, infections declined from an estimated 27,000 to 4,400 over the same period.

But falling infections do not mean the threat has disappeared. The challenge is to sustain those gains among young people navigating relationships…

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