Arms Reach Care: Summary
Over 2 million infants and children are living with HIV, the vast majority infected at birth. These infants have at best a life-expectancy of 5 years. The problem of providing cost-effective care for HIV infected infants in resource-strapped sub-Saharan Africa has remained a significant challenge. Arms Reach Care (ARC) is a unique community-based approach developed by the Power of Love Foundation to take advantage of Africa's most valuable resource - its family network - to provide comprehensive care for HIV infected infants and children. ARC was developed in partnership with MIT's D-Lab, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Waitt Family Foundation to bring for-profit best-practices and cost-management into a stressed environment. Using a tiered structure comprising of Family Care Givers, Community Care Assistants and a mobile Nurse, the ARC program delivers a package of critical services to HIV+ infants and children at a low cost/child/year. The validation of this model is that in the 4 years since the model was implemented, POL has lost only 2 children out of approx 200. There have been no deaths in the last 12 months.
At present there are 135 HIV positive children in POL’s ARC program. The program provides continuous care, food, medicines, psychosocial counseling and weekly Community Care Assistant/Nurse visits to all the children. The program includes a comprehensive initial training and refresher courses to family caregivers of the children. In addition, caregivers are provided micro loans to help strengthen their economic status and provide food and schooling to the children at home. By taking a comprehensive view of the situation, the ARC program has delivered measurably improved quality of life and life-expectancy for the HIV+ infants and children enrolled.
The ARC program has been studied by local and international agencies and portions of the program have been replicated in Zambia including training over 500 caregivers in the city of Lusaka. The model is ready for replication in sub-Saharan Africa.