Africare-South Africa

Africare’s History in South Africa

Africare has assisted the South African people with a wide array of programs designed to redress the imbalances of apartheid and to improve basic living conditions among the rural poor.  Beginning in 1989, Africare’s first project in South Africa, The South Africa Career Development Internship (CDI) program, improved training and employment opportunities for hundreds of black South Africans attempting to enter the corporate mainstream.

During the 1994-96 transitional years, Africare started a major program in democratic governance at the highest national levels. In subsequent years, Africare established community-based computer-training centers called "digital villages;" and since 1999, carried out extensive programming to address the crisis of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.  In addition, Africare-South Africa focused on agricultural production and support to small, rural entrepreneurs — for despite its high levels of multinational corporate investment and its sophisticated urban areas, South Africa has a vast rural population that is as desperately poor and needy as the people in most other countries continent-wide.

 

Africare-South Africa Today

Africare-South Africa is invested in comprehensive HIV/AIDS services to the Eastern Cape Province through the Injongo Yethu Project.  In partnership with the South African Government, The President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief and the Center for Disease Control, Injongo Yethu is building district capacity, providing a full spectrum of quality comprehensive HIV/AIDS services at health facilities, at home and in local communities.

 

To date, the project has supported interventions to provide high-quality HIV/AIDS services and to improve access to HIV prevention education, testing, care, treatment, and counseling in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Specific interventions focus on promoting HIV prevention that includes behavior change, abstinence, being faithful, correct and consistent use of condoms, stigma reduction. An additional prevention strategy is prevention of mother to child transmission.  Furthermore, the project has supported the activation and implementation of antiretroviral therapy and treatment of opportunistic infections in over 75 hospitals and clinics in the Eastern Cape. It is also supporting the establishment of counseling and testing, prevention of mother-to-child transmission services, and the provision of care and support services to infected community members including orphans and vulnerable children (OVC).

Learn More about the Injongo Yethu Project here

 

Country Profile: South Africa

REGION: Southern Africa
CAPITAL CITY: Pretoria (legislative capital: Cape Town)
POPULATION: 49,109,107
LAND AREA: 1,214,470 sq km (754,637 sq miles)

With Nelson Mandela's 1990 release from prison, the repeal of the last apartheid laws and the unbanning of political parties in South Africa and, finally, the country's first free elections in April 1994 ― South Africans emerged from more than a century of minority oppression and entered the new era of majority rule. Today, South Africa is a middle-income, emerging market with an abundant supply of natural resources; well-developed financial, legal, communications, energy and transport sectors; a stock exchange that ranks among the 10 largest in the world; and a modern infrastructure supporting an efficient distribution of goods to major urban centers throughout the Southern African region. Unemployment, however, remains high. And serious economic problems linger from the apartheid era, especially poverty among historically-disadvantaged black South Africans. As elsewhere in Southern Africa, the Republic of South Africa has been hard-hit by HIV/AIDS. South Africa is at the southern tip of the continent of Africa and includes the Prince Edward Islands.
           

Country Stats Life expectancy: 50.8 years (USA: 77.9) Under-5 child mortality: 69/1,000 live births (USA: 7/1,000) HIV prevalence, ages 15-49: [15.4 - 20.9]% (USA: [0.4 - 1.0]%) Physicians per 100,000 people: 77 (USA: 256) People undernourished: Not available (USA: 0%) People with access to safe drinking water: 88% (USA: 100%) Adult literacy: 82.4% (USA: 99%) Gross National Income: $11,110 (USA: $41,890) People living on less than $1 a day: 10.7% (USA: 0%) (HIV prevalence statistics, UNAIDS. All other statistics, 2007/2008 Human Development Report, UNDP)

 

(Updated, June 2010)