AILES: Rehabilitating people who use drugs and people living with HIV

AILES is handholding beneficiaries to treatment centres and empower themselves to be adherent to their treatment and lead a stable life. They are offered accompaniment, assistance to fulfil basic needs, medical care throughout this process.

The NGO contributes mainly to the wellbeing, improvement of health, social integration of poor people living with HIV and people who use drugs in Mauritius and help them become adherent to their treatment and reintegrate society.

The 2017 IBBS survey provided an estimated number of 6,000 people who were actively injecting drugs. An estimated 300 (new) PWIDs had started to inject drugs since one year or less ago. In the same year the prevalence of HIV infection among PWIDs was 32.4% . HIV prevalence was 33.2% among male PWIDs and was 28.5% among female PWIDs.

Key Action of AILES is the Induction to Methadone substitution therapy for drug users and this is done through:

• Psychological Counselling Visit
• Home & Hospital & Nurse Visit
• Accompaniment to social welfare aid services
• Group Therapy with patients admitted in Methadone Centres
• Focus group with people already inducted on MST
• Support Group with women and mothers living with HIV
• Support Group with Family Members
• Training of Peer Educators
• Advocacy for access to state provided services & respect of Human Rights

The partners of the organisation include: PILS, CUT, Global Fund and the AIDS Unit. AILES conduct a lot of capacity building which involves their partners.

AILES ensures monitoring and evaluation through:

• Participatory evaluations conducted with the beneficiaries and other key stakeholders, empowering, building their capacity, ownership and support
• Every trimester a focus group was organised with clients to know if the project needed to be reviewed and improved.
• The last focus group organised with women featured on national television
• Feedback was taken from the community, before and after project
• Data entries concerning the project
• Individual File entries to track and follow progress
• Individual and group interviews to track perceptions of beneficiaries towards the project
• Reporting Tools for complaints

AILES wishes to mobilise more funds to be able to sustain the project during the coming years as well as standing up against criminalisation of PLHIV/MST. They will advocate for better quality service in treatment so as to retain maximum patient & effective harm reduction strategies