Onward Chironda

Updated January 2024

Onward is a religious leader and an advocate for gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and rights. He leads MY-AGE (Masvingo Youth and Adolescence Group for Edutainment), a member organization of the COMPASS program.

Impact

Onward worked with religious leaders, bringing about their commitment to tolerance and ending stigma and discrimination of LGBTQ populations. He succeeded in integrating LGBTQ needs into Zimbabwe’s Adolescent Health Implementation Strategy. And, his engagement on the Global Fund writing team ensured KP issues were prioritized in the country’s concept note.

Media

Materials

Cleopatra Sheilla Makura

Cleopatra Sheilla Makura is a youth advocate who has volunteered at SAYWHAT for the past three years as a peer educator providing information, counseling and referrals to peers in tertiary institutions. She also served as the SAYWHAT National Coordinating Chairperson, engaging parliamentarians and other key stakeholders for students’ sexual and reproductive health and rights. Additionally, Cleopatra served as a PrEP champion advocating for its acceptance in communities. She strongly believes in meaningful engagement and participation of young people in tertiary institutions to bring out positive change including the prevention of new HIV infections and ending AIDS. Cleopatra attained her degree in psychology in 2018 at the University of Zimbabwe.

Why I Want to Advocate for HIV Prevention in 2019, and What I Plan to Do
There are tools to prevent HIV such as PrEP and more are potentially on the horizon, such as the dapivirine ring. This gives me more power to advocate for HIV prevention. I want to influence my government to strengthen health services for HIV prevention, especially among young people. Specifically, my project aims to include PrEP in Zimbabwe’s university clinics as part of the minimum HIV/SRH package of services. I will also mobilize demand for PrEP on campus and engage students around ongoing research in Zimbabwe.

My Work as a Fellow

Deloune Matongo

Deloune is a public health programmer, researcher and SRHR youth advocate, who recently served as the Assistant National Youth, VMMC and Condom Coordinator under the National AIDS Council of Zimbabwe. During the same period, he was Secretariat to the National Young People’s Network on SRH, HIV and AIDS, a consortium of all the youth-serving organizations in the national response to HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe. Deloune has been an Executive Committee member of the Health Promotion Association of Zimbabwe (HEPAZ) since 2015 and a member of the National ASRH Coordination Forum of the Ministry of Health and Child Care. In 2017, he published two public health research papers.

Advocacy Accomplishments for the Year
Deloune created demand for PrEP while fostering a supportive environment for LGBTQ HIV prevention programming at the national level. His accomplishments include the development of Zimbabwe’s first National Key Population Implementation Plan, which increased the number of KP-receptive services to 24 from 6; the development of the Key Populations Manual for Healthcare Providers, which was drafted together with the KP Minimum Service Package; and he influenced the ministry of health to implement the country’s first MSM size estimation.

In His Own Words
“When the fellowship project commenced, I did not believe I had the capacity to influence government at high level and persuade them to consider my suggestions. I, however, learnt that there is power in diplomacy when it comes to advocacy. Most of my achievements were as a result of diplomatic engagements with the powers that be.”

Materials

Sinikwe “Nikki” Mtetwa

Sinikwe is a passionate women’s health and rights advocate who has been involved for more than a decade on issues around HIV and sexual reproductive health and rights. She has done extensive work with female sex workers at CeSHHAR to ensure that they are part of HIV interventions developed for them. She is currently involved in the AMETHIST Study at CeSHHAR Zimbabwe.

Fellowship Focus
Bathabile and Sinikwe worked together and focused on sex workers’ acceptance of PrEP ahead of Zimbabwe’s national rollout. They worked with young sex workers, conducting over 50 community dialogues across the country, joined the Ministry of Health’s Technical Working Group on PrEP and engaged health workers, the police, church members and male partners to pave the way for culturally competent PrEP services, free of harassment and/or discrimination. They spoke on radio talk shows and drafted a position paper targeted at the Ministry of Health to emphasize the need for PrEP for young women and adolescent girls as an integral part of Zimbabwe’s comprehensive HIV prevention response.

In Their Own Words
We also learned that using every available resource tool when advocating is beneficial, e.g., the media, as targeted groups and the communities in which they live are reached with information. Personally, when I am passionate about something or against some injustice, it usually end in doing things in anger or haste. Now, as an advocate, I have the capacity to clearly map the way I want to deliver certain information to exert change. I now recognize the importance of identifying a gap, a challenge, a hindrance etc. to change and deal with it.

Materials

Bathabile Nyathi

Bathabile still works with the CeSHARR sex work program in Zimbabwe and is also the vice chairperson and co-founder of a sex worker-led organisation, Women Against All Forms of Discrimination (WAAD). She started sex work at the age of fourteen. After noticing that most sex workers believe that they are already HIV positive or will eventually become so because of the nature of their work, she dedicated her life to empowering her peers. When she tested HIV-negative, she started taking PrEP and has made it her calling to mobilize sex workers to seek and access PrEP and other relevant services to remain healthy.

Fellowship Focus
Sinikwe and Bathabile’s work together focused on sex workers’ acceptance of PrEP ahead of Zimbabwe’s national rollout. They worked with young sex workers, conducting over 50 community dialogues across the country, joined the Ministry of Health’s Technical Working Group on PrEP and engaged health workers, the police, church members and male partners to pave the way for culturally competent PrEP services, free of harassment and/or discrimination. They spoke on radio talk shows and drafted a position paper targeted at the Ministry of Health to emphasize the need for PrEP for young women and adolescent girls as an integral part of Zimbabwe’s comprehensive HIV prevention response.

In Their Own Words
I had feared to be stigmatized or that some would not allow their young women to attend the dialogues I organized, as a sex worker. But I think I managed to keep the demand on PrEP and I ensured that I provided support to everyone who needed information about the pill.

Materials

Anna Miti

Anna is a journalist at the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and also a media trainer and coordinator of media science cafes. She has been a broadcast journalist for the past fifteen years, covering most of the beats in the newsroom including current affairs and politics, arts, gender and even sports. She is a leader among health journalists in Zimbabwe, a member of the Federation of African Media Women in Zimbabwe and a member of the Editor’s Forum on HIV/AIDS.

Fellowship Focus
Anna pushed for HIV prevention options for young women and girls in Zimbabwe. Her work focused on awareness-raising, demand creation, media engagement and inclusion of young women and girls in research and rollout of interventions such as PrEP and microbicides. She created a network of civil society organizations and individuals focused on PrEP, microbicides and vaccines research advocacy, increased the quality and quantity of media coverage of HIV prevention and helped to bridge the gap between researchers and the communities for whom these interventions are developed.

In Their Own Words
My motivation is driven by the possibility that we can end AIDS by 2030, and that women all over the world can have prevention tools within their control, as currently they are sitting ducks for infection due to biological, social and cultural reasons.

My Work as a Fellow

  • Blog: Anna started a blog to directly engage young women and those who develop and deliver programming for them to help raise issues of HIV prevention and young women, and to help find solutions to them.
  • Blog post: In this HIV Vaccine Awareness Day piece, Anna challenges readers to join the search for an effective AIDS vaccine – to compliment the existing tools to help realize the end of AIDS.
  • Fellowship summary report: “My Fellowship Year” is a report on Anna Miti’s advocacy for HIV prevention options for for young women and girls in Zimbabwe. It highlights her efforts on awareness-raising, demand creation, media engagement, and inclusion of young women and girls in research and rollout of interventions such as PrEP and microbicides.

Paul Sixpence

Paul is a development and humanitarian projects manager with expertise in media advocacy and communications on biomedical HIV prevention and treatment, the sexual and reproductive health and rights of adolescent girls and young women (AGYW), access to justice, community legal empowerment and human rights. he has done extensive work on the use of media as an advocacy tool to push for policy support around new HIV prevention science. Specifically, he’s been involved in efforts to muster more resources for demonstration studies and rapid rollout of biomedical prevention interventions through the public health system.

Fellowship Focus
Paul’s work focused on advocacy for PrEP regulatory approval and development of guidelines for use in Zimbabwe. His advocacy influenced PrEP policy and guideline development in Zimbabwe in addition to demonstration projects and eventual rollout among adolescent girls and young women, discordant couples and key populations. He also worked with the media to help create an enabling environment for key populations to enjoy their health and human rights in Zimbabwe.

In Their Own Words
It is critical that we as civil society work with all other partners to create alternative spaces for discussion, and also allow young people themselves to discuss among themselves and articulate their challenges and determine solutions for their challenges.

My Work as a Fellow

  • Truvada as PrEP: A new HIV prevention option on the table for Zimbabwe? In this piece that ran in The Zimbabwe Chronicle, and also featured on AVAC’s blog, P-Values, Paul calls for PrEP rollout for young women, sex workers and sero discordant couples in Zimbabwe.

Definate Nhamo

Definate is currently working on dapivirine ring planning and introduction under the PROMISE consortium, funded by USAID. She has also been a lead on projects to roll out PrEP in Zimbabwe. Previously, through her work on the Shaping the Health of Adolescents in Zimbabwe (SHAZ!) Project, Definate developed extensive experience working with orphaned and vulnerable adolescent girls and young women living on the streets. She won the Young Women Investigator’s prize at the 2013 International AIDS Society Conference in Malaysia for her abstract on adolescents and gender-based violence.

Fellowship Focus
Definate advocated for comprehensive HIV prevention options for young women and for their integration into sexual and reproductive health programs in Zimbabwe. She documented the perspectives of young women that she used to inform the consolidated national guidelines. She also worked with researchers and civil society members to prepare for microbicide trial results and accelerate regulatory considerations once results were released, as well as to influence the rollout of PrEP in Zimbabwe.

Definate’s Media Advocacy

Margaret Cynthia Mungofa

Cynthia is a gender, HIV/AIDS and development specialist with extensive experience working at the community level with diverse groups in Zimbabwe, including sex workers and marginalized women such as widows and adolescent girls and young women towards their equitable access to sexual reproductive health and rights. She’s currently a program manager for Zimbabwe Rural Women Empowerment Trust (ZRWET) and previously worked at the Zimbabwe Women Against HIV/AIDS, Poverty and Violence (ZWAAPV). She is a writer and a singer-songwriter with a keen interest in the Afro-jazz musical genre.

Fellowship Focus
Cynthia sensitized high risk groups and marginalized women on microbicides and other viable HIV prevention options. She initiated dialogue about microbicides in order to empower women in rural areas like Murewa, where her project was based. Cynthia believes that we should strengthen advocacy around the need to expand HIV prevention tools controlled by women. Her Fellowship primarily focused on exploring what rural women know about these options and specifically microbicides, and empowering them by initiating dialogue around these strategies.

In Their Own Words
Women in developing countries, Zimbabwe included, are constrained by cultural barriers and therefore cannot initiate or decide on prevention methods to use. Therefore, interventions like microbicides are important for these women since they not only provide another safe option that they can control but also help to address strong cultural barriers that constrain women and limit access.

Munyaradzi Chimwara

Munyaradzi is the Project Lead on COMPASS Zimbabwe, advocating for quality and affordable health service delivery in Zimbabwe. His background is in media production. He got involved in microbicides in 2005 while producing a radio show on HIV/AIDS and subsequently attended Microbicides 2006 in Cape Town, South Africa. During the conference Munyaradzi noted and appreciated the role that advocacy and advocates play in microbicides trials. After having the opportunity to attend a Track D session, “Beyond Involvement: Civil society’s role in making ethical progress towards a microbicide”, conducted by the late Omololu Falobi of the Nigeria HIV Vaccine and Microbicides Advocacy Group, Munyaradzi felt he was challenged to do something about the lack of advocacy initiatives in the Zimbabwe microbicides research landscape.

Fellowship Focus
Munyaradzi’s project mainly addressed how the media reports on and is engaged in HIV prevention trials in Zimbabwe. He identified needs and opportunities to improve the media’s ongoing balanced, accurate, consistent and reliable reporting on HIV prevention trials in Zimbabwe. He provided training and resources to journalists, editors and community advisory board members.

In Their Own Words
It should be understood by all that it is the burden of the disease that has overwhelmed our continent, and it is only when we find new and better tools—including a vaccine—that women and men can use to protect themselves from HIV, only then would we truly have cause for celebration.