EMPHASIS Project, CARE has recently been highlighted by UNAIDS in Bangladesh as a ‘best practice’ model. In the recently released Country Progress Report for Bangladesh which has been produced by UNAIDS with the National AIDS/STD Programme of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Bangladesh, as the main coordinating body, EMPHASIS is one of seven projects identified as good initiatives.
(Please see below the information on EMPHASIS from the UNAIDS Country Progress Report)
Addressing HIV vulnerability among Cross Border Mobile Population
Cross‐border movement into India has become a necessity for economic survival of people living in bordering areas of Bangladesh. EMPHASIS (Enhancing Mobile Population’s Access to HIV & AIDS services, Information and Support) is the very first ground breaking 5 years (Aug 2009‐Aug 2014) sub‐ regional initiative by CARE India, Bangladesh and Nepal funded by BIG Lottery Group of United Kingdom. The project works with highly vulnerable groups who are largely poor, with low literacy rate coming from rural Bangladesh and end up migrating to cities (specially at Mumbai and Delhi) in India with dreams and hopes of better jobs to support their family back home.
The baseline study identified the major push factors of cross border mobility are lack of employment and poverty at source; pull factors are more employment opportunity, higher wages, recreation opportunities, and peer pressure etc at destination. Unknowingly the mobile people fall into HIV & STI risk: men meet their sexual need unsafely at destination, women become involved in 51 sex trade for endurance at destination or in the course of mobility they are abused / harassed by power people at source and destination. This continues as frequent phenomena for years and it acts as driving force of stigma towards them (Ref: Baseline study of EMPHASIS Project).
The major objective of the intervention is to test model to reduce HIV vulnerabilities of the undocumented migrant population and their family members to demonstrate model intervention for future replication. Three areas for intervention were identified: creating access to information and services, enhancing capacities of service providers, research and advocacy. Strategies include:
Obtaining Broker’s assistance to reach cross border mobile population
The approach to reach impact population (IP) at transit areas is to reach them through brokers at the place they are stopping over during their travel, a place where no one is going to find them. After one year implementation at selected border areas, outreach was built on trusting relationships with the brokers and reaching Ips with necessary HIV & service access information at locations selected by brokers. The outreach activity at transit has been established from field learning that People from different districts choose this transit for safe undocumented trespass and sometimes takes a stopover close to the land port to secure a safe time for the trespass. Migrants sometimes bring their family to villages near the porous border area. The outreach activity through contact with the broker is thus successful as it doesn’t have any implication of facing law enforcement agency harassment.