By IPS Correspondents
DAKAR, Sep 2 2003 (IPS)

Women’s groups are urging health officials to make premarital HIV testing mandatory so that ”young women are protected against AIDS”.

The CAR-Femmes coalition, which is spearheading the campaign, is being supported by the Association of Women and Youth for Africa’s Development.

Safietou Ba Diop, the coordinator of CAR-Femmes, says ”many Senegalese women believe that prenuptial testing will protect them against HIV infection”.

But Anne Marie Sow Sall, the president of the Association of Women and Youth for Africa’s Development, says more work, including ”awareness campaign”, is needed, “for Senegalese women to appreciate the necessity of the prenuptial testing”.

Tradition still plays a major role in Senegal, although Islam is a way of life for the majority – or 90 percent – of the population.

Marie Cisse Thioye, president of the Association for Disadvantage Children, says the testing will prevent ”marriage with people living with HIV/AIDS and giving birth to infected children”. A social worker by training, Thioye believes that while AIDS is being fought on the medical front, it must also be fought on the other fronts.

To make it law, the women’s groups are urging parliament ”to pass the mandatory prenuptial testing” immediately.

“Up till now, Senegal has no laws against HIV/AIDS,” says Thioye.

”As a result, many people have been exposed to HIV/AIDS without knowing it. For example, some people still think that they are safe because they mistakenly believe that their partners are faithful. People who hang out with sex workers also believe that they are safe,” says Marieme Soumaire of the Association for Women at Risks of AIDS.

”Even some professionals who know a lot about the disease and its means of transmission, still refuse to believe that they will be infected,” Soumaire says.

Organisations involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS, such as the National Alliance Against AIDS, have called upon Senegalese lawmakers to make it a criminal offence not to take the premarital AIDS test.

”We need first to legislate so that the justice system can protect our people,” says Thioye.

Babacar Samb, an Islamist, believes that abstinence is the best way of avoiding AIDS. To defeat the disease, Samb calls for ”greater awareness among the population, who give great weight to abstinence and a return to cultural values”.

”The only way to avoid the spread of AIDS is to ask young people to renew their understanding of religious precepts, which advise sexual abstinence outside of marriage,” he says.

Senegal’s First Lady, Viviane Wade, recently appealed to Senegalese to go for the HIV testing so as to avoid infecting their partners. To her, ”voluntarily infecting one’s partner should be considered an intentional crime”.

Wade, who is president of Health-Education, a non-governmental organisation, believes that ”the only solution for combating the spread of AIDS in Senegal is to develop an automatic response among our compatriots to have themselves tested voluntarily”.

Although there are voluntary testing centres in the big cities, most Senegalese still balk at the idea of voluntarily testing.

To popularise voluntary testing, Wade initiated a year-long campaign against HIV/AIDS in July. The theme is ”Living Positively with HIV/AIDS” and its goal is to lower the rate of infected newborns to less than 10 percent.

The campaign will be conducted from “village-to-village” in the country’s 11 regions, and will promote voluntary testing to stop new cases of AIDS among women and young people.

In will also involve awareness training for students of all ages, immigrant families (many Senegalese work overseas mostly in France and Belgium) and members of the armed forces.

Wade’s plan is part of a programme initiated by the Organisation of African States Against AIDS, which was founded by African First Ladies in Bamako, Mali, in July. Through the organisation, the First Ladies will fight HIV/AIDS in their respective countries.

Senegal, which has a prevalence rate of 1.4 percent, is one of the countries least affected by HIV/AIDS. At the end of 2000, the official figures showed 80,000 people living with the virus, 77,000 percent of whom were adults. The ratio of men to women was 9:7.

Senegal’s 2002-2006 strategic plan against AIDS aims to maintain the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate below three percent until 2006.

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