Every morning at six, Nicholas takes his pill. It keeps the 16-year-old’s illness under control. Nicholas, whose real name is different, is HIV-positive. Thanks to the medication, the young Kenyan can live his life.
This isn’t easy for the young man from the Kibera slum in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Money is scarce at home, and so is food. Today, Nicholas shares his worries with Simeon Otieno. The 26-year-old volunteers at the Tabitha Medical Center in Kibera and supports HIV-positive young people like Nicholas.
Joy Barnice, head of the Tabitha Health Clinic, emphasizes how important support and guidance are, especially for young people. With puberty and first relationships, a new process of coming to terms with the infection begins, she explains. It’s essential to talk about it in relationships—and to be prepared for rejection. Simeon Otieno, himself HIV-positive and raised as an AIDS orphan, knows what that’s like: He, too, has experienced such rejection multiple times and even stopped taking his medication at times because he wanted to suppress the illness.
In Kenya, with its approximately 60 million inhabitants, official figures show that over 1.3 million people are HIV-positive, with nearly 20,000 new cases reported last year. About two-thirds are women. The HIV prevalence, which indicates infections among 15- to 49-year-olds, is three percent – down from over ten percent in the mid-1990s. However, the rate remains significantly higher in the slums than in the rest of the country. 21,000 HIV-related deaths were recorded in 2024.
Worldwide, around 40 million people are infected. In 2024, approximately 600,000 died from AIDS-related causes.
Read the full article on Evangelischer Pressedienst, HNA Online, Offenbach Post.