Mothers Help Each Other Prevent HIV in Newborns

When a pregnant woman in Rwanda or Uganda learns she is HIV-positive, she may be tempted to keep the diagnosis to herself, for fear of the social repercussions of seeking treatment. She may not know that there are steps she can take to help prevent the disease from passing to her child.

Mothers2mothers works to disrupt the cycle of pediatric HIV. Founded in 2001, the nonprofit employs HIV-positive mothers as mentors to coach other women on how to give birth to healthy babies. The rate of HIV transmission for program participants has dropped to less than 5 percent — a level at which the United Nations considers transmission “virtually eliminated.”

“The greatest resource we have in Africa are mothers themselves,” says Robin Smalley, co-founder and director of mothers2mothers.

Early on, it wasn’t easy to recruit women to serve as mentors because of the stigma HIV carries.

“Women could suffer terribly if they disclosed,” Ms. Smalley says. “They could get beaten, thrown out of their homes, have children taken away, lose all of their rights. It took a tremendous amount of courage.” But the promise of a paying job, plus a desire to help others, inspired mothers to sign up.

In clinics where mothers2mothers operates, mentors build relationships with expectant mothers, offer them support in their communities, and make sure they follow treatment plans. The nonprofit has programs in eight countries in southern and eastern Africa and is working with the governments of Kenya and South Africa to integrate its programs into those countries’ national health-care systems.

The mentors deliver a message of hope, Ms. Smalley says, by assuring pregnant women that HIV “is not a death sentence” and that they can protect their children: “There really is no reason why any child anywhere needs to be born HIV-positive.”