On 19th-20th August, AIDS Foundation East-West (AFEW) organised a conference in the southern Ukrainian city of Yalta to mark the culmination of its three-year project ‘Institutionalisation of Health Promotion and HIV Prevention in the Educational System of the Ukraine State Department of Corrections’. This project, which ran from July 2007-June 2010, was funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands through its ground-breaking ‘Matra’ development programme.
The event attracted over 70 participants, including senior representatives of the Ukrainian prison service, a representative from the Embassy of the Netherlands to Ukraine, Joost van der Meer, AFEW’s Executive Director, and Elena Voskresenskaya, the organisation’s Regional Director for Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova.
At the conference, Elena Voskresenskaya emphasised the huge progress that the project has made towards tackling infectious diseases in prisons and creating a rights-based approach to prison health in Ukraine. Over the three, years of the project, AFEW assisted in setting up a nationwide HIV policy through the development of training curricula and educational materials for inmates and staff, as well as training teams of peer trainers among staff and prisoners. Read the full article on www.afew.org…
