Barbra Pakamisa is a 23–year–old mother of three children from Mbare, Zimbabwe. Since it’s hard to provide for their children, Barbra and her husband decided to stop having kids. However, most contraceptive options were either too expensive or unavailable to her. Nearly 50 % of the total unmet need for contraception is among Zimbabwe’s poorest women. She then heard that the local clinic had started offering implant insertions free of charge. So she went and got the contraceptive implant inserted.
With funding by the Dutch Government’s SALIN initiative, PSI has trained over 300 health care workers at 150 public health care facilities throughout Zimbabwe in quality implant insertion. SALIN support has allowed 40,000 women to benefit from these long-term family planning methods since 2008.
Even with the implant, Barbra and her husband use condoms, because they know that the implant won’t protect against HIV or other infections. Zimbabwe has one of the worse HIV epidemics in the world. 14 % of all adults are infected, and 60% of those infected with HIV in Zimbabwe are women.
Under the SALIN project, more than 600,000 women and couples have benefitted from integrated family planning and HIV counseling sessions that emphasize the importance of dual protection methods to prevent pregnancy and HIV infection.
