Efforts By Government Part 1`

Last year, the Ministry of Health launched the Integrated Support Programme on Sexual and Reproductive Health and HIV Prevention, more commonly known as the ISP. The four year programme has approximately $95million in committed resources from the Governments of Britain, Ireland and Sweden. 

The programme is aimed at supporting the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Women affairs in providing integrated services in sexual and reproductive health, HIV prevention and gender based violence prevention and response. At lapse of the programme, there has to be a   reduction of maternal morbidity and mortality, cervical cancer, gender based violence and HIV.

The programme has four priority areas, namely family planning, cervical
cancer, gender based violence and HIV prevention. In most cases, these priority areas are often left out or given little attention during programming and yet they have a negative impact on all our efforts to ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights. For this reason, ISP had to have principal priorities in it.

It really doesn’t make sense for an HIV positive woman doing exceptionally well in ART to die from cervical cancer. Sexual and reproductive health challenges have remained a very big problem from women and girls which have attracted harmful effects. These negative effects include unsafe abortions increased sexual abuse and new STI and HIV infections. Although these challenges seem undefeatable in isolation, but once they are grouped together, women's health and meeting the MDG target of fighting HIV/AIDS.

Current indicators for the ISP focus areas are so far not encouraging. About 1 900 women in Zimbabwe are diagnosed and 1 300 die of cervical cancer every year while 3 in 10 women have suffered from physical violence at some point since the age of 15. HIV still remains the largest cause of death among men and women of reproductive age and children. close to 211 000 women who want to avoid or postpone childbearing are not using any method of contraception and a reduction of this number by half could avert an estimated 780 000 unintended pregnancies, 110 500 unsafe abortions and 4 200 maternal deaths. 

ISP is a welcome intervention as to seeks to improve the availability and accessibility of family planning to all women particularly whose in the rural areas, girls and women living with HIV.