An estimated 3.5 million Nigerians are infected with HIV

Nigeria’s fight against AIDS

With 3.5 million infected, Nigeria has blended foreign funding with locally tailored strategies to fight HIV/AIDS.
In a small home tucked away on a side street in the city of Kaduna in northern Nigeria, Aisha Yakubu watches her son take out three bottles of prescribed medications from a dresser in his bedroom. The eight-year-old boy ignores the kittens meandering around his legs as he twists open the caps of each of the white bottles.

Every day he takes anti-viral drugs: 200 miligrams of Aluvia, 150 miligrams of Truvada and half a tablet of Septrin. “I think he contracted the HIV from his mother,” Yakubu says.

About six years ago, she found the boy lying in a heap of rubbish in an abandoned building. She picked him up, took him home and has been raising him as her son ever since. Together, they strive to overcome the challenges and stigmas surrounding those infected with HIV.

“After seven [in the evening] you couldn’t even say HIV then because people were so afraid,” she says. She explains that the word to describe HIV or AIDS in the local Hausa language, kanjamau, refers to a sickly, skeleton-like person with scabby skin.

In 2005, after several months of losing weight and being accused of possessing an evil spirit that was making her sick, Yakubu said she became depressed and her relatives, some Christians and others Muslims, did not offer her enough support. “The Christians were saying I need deliverance and the Muslims were saying I was a sinner,” she said.

She finally visited a medical doctor who told her she was HIV-positive. She said the news “completely threw her off balance”. She suspected her second, now former, husband had given her the virus.