Annual Report 2019
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Annual Report 2019 Editor Life4me.plus to fight AIDS, Hepatitis C and Tuberculosis Dragonerstrasse 53 5600 Lenzburg Switzerland Telephone +41 62 892 24 90 [email protected] www.life4me.plus Content Introduction/summary 4 Motto of the year 5 Core activities 6 News 6 Collage column 7 Social media 8 Website 9 App 9 Campaign 10 Projects & Collaborations 11 MENA region 11 VITAL project in Lesotho 12 Public Health EnglanD 12 Improving access to treatment in EECA 12 ECAT and ITPC collaboration 13 Swiss collaboration 14 Germany 14 Conference/forum participations 15 Partners 16 Engagement & Support 17 Finances 18 Appendix 22 1. BackgrounD 23 2. Goal 23 3. Tasks 23 4. Activities 24 5. Partners 33 6. Duration 33 President's Foreword Let’s celebrate life and live well. "No matter what your diagnosis, it's important to embrace life and live it to the full." With these words we started our large-scale campaign #NoHIVstigma, the aim of which was to neutralize stigma and discrimination aimed at people living with HIV. Unfortunately, we still have stigma in medical institutions, stigma in the working place, in schools, universities, among friends, self-stigma – EVERYWHERE there is Stigma. We know, if we fight the HIV stigma, we can stop the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Stigma is often crEated by fEar, stigma is crEated through lack of information or misinformation, stigma is crEated through lack of support. Stigma encourages people to hide, to not show their rEal faces, to be afraid of disclosing their status. Stigma leads to depression and impacts upon mental hEalth. Stigma burns a person from the inside. Stigma ultimately kills. We must fight stigma to overcome inequality in care and defEat the epidemic. This is why we started the campaign and can sprEad awareness about HIV among more than a million people. Hundreds of people took to the streets in solidarity with us to say together: "No HIV stigma!". This has been a yEar of fighting stigma and our fight has only just begun. The work of the Life4me.plus would not be possible without the financial support of many donors, but also of the EACS and UNAIDS. I would like to Express my sincere thanks to all those who have supported us in this important journEy. Your help and support in my grEatly appreciated, Thank you. Dr. Alex Schneider President Life4me.plus to fight AIDS, Hepatitis C and Tuberculosis Introduction/summary Our organisation was established in 2017, but has its roots dating back to 2013. Originating as a group of activists, we started publishing news about HIV on Twitter, and later developed the dedicated website. The group of activists evolved over 4 years into a full-fledged non-profit organisation, providing support around the world. Our main goal is to prevent new cases of HIV, Hepatitis C, other STI’s and Tuberculosis, and support people living with HIV, to combat the impact of stigma/discrimination and increase access to treatmen www.life4me.plus The year 2019 was very fruitful and action-packed. We expanded our geographical involvement beyond the countries of the WHO Europe region, to start working with 21 countries of the MENA region plus South Africa and Lesotho. We added new languages to both our application and our website. Website traffic doubled compared to 2018, and our social media presence generated coverage of 1.5 Million. This year's focus was on the #NoHIVstigma campaign, which we launched in the run-up to the European AIDS Conference EACS2019 and which has gained immense popularity in countries across the WHO Europe region and around the world. The goal of the campaign was to de-stigmatise HIV through improved awareness. The heart of the campaign was the anti-HIV stigma demonstration, where we all together said NO to HIV STIGMA. Looking ahead, we plan to continue our HIV education/awareness campaigns to reach more and more people, especially with a focus on the general population. 4 Motto of the year Our motto of the year is based on the motto of our biggest campaign held during 2019: 5 Core activities Our Core activities are focused primarily around all types of Media and IT. News One of our main activities is to raise awareness across the general population, including activists and specialists, about HIV, viral hepatitis and tuberculosis, as well as about stigmatised and vulnerable groups. We usually do this by publishing the news and articles: scientific advances, changes in policy and legislation, social innovations and more. This year we published 882 news (2’008’215 impressions), including 772 news articles in Russian (1’740’106 impressions), 73 news articles in English (242’478 impressions) and 37 news articles in German (25’631 impressions). The German news feeds actually started in October 2019, for the first time. The chart below summarises the trend of news over the past years. Life4me+ published news 1800 1600 1400 558 1200 180 1000 37 800 73 600 110 1106 958 400 772 639 363 532 200 76 0 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Ru EN DE As news in Russian is the most popular, we have initiated a subscription by email so that you can receive it conveniently, without missing articles. We have 836 subscribers for the news in Russian as at December 31st 2019, which represents a 32% increase on the previous year (632 users in 2018). 6 Collage column The Collage column was launched in October 2017, in Russian as a series of interviews with peer counsellors, living with HIV to provide psychological and informational support to people who have recently found out about their diagnosis. Over time, it began to include interviews with activists and relatives of people living with HIV. In 2019, Collage published 46 interviews with 44 guests from different countries across the East European and Central Asia regions with 136’981 impressions. Core activities 7 Social media Throughout the year, we have been actively working with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. In total, 2'725 posts were published, which reached more than 1.5 million people. More details see below in the table: 2019 Posts Engagements Impressions RU 871 4’389 467’934 EN 180 4’063 644’523 Twitter DE 99 24’635 151’800 Total 1’150 33’087 1’264’257 Posts Involvement Reach RU 600 13’730 108’259 EN 96 608 8’056 Facebook DE 53 658 54’923 Total 749 14’996 171’238 Instagram 23 1’126 30’660 VkontaktE 803 4’842 45’623 For the first time, in October 2019, we started running the German feed on Twitter and Facebook. This could bring us more posts, which means greater reach, but in 2019 we spent little effort on Instagram compared to 2018 (23 posts in 2019 compared to 241 posts in 2018), as well as on VKontakte (803 posts in 2019 compared to 1’030 posts in 2018). The total coverage for the year was still much more and many times higher compared to 2018, primarily down to the NoHIVStigma campaign we conducted (see more details below). Core activities 8 Website This year, 249’000 users visited our website with a total of 493’000 sessions. Each session was for an average of 57 seconds. Most of the users were from Russia, representing 79% of all users, then Ukraine (7%) and USA (3%). The share of users from Kazakhstan, Belarus, Moldova, Uzbekistan, Germany and Kyrgyzstan is between 0.6-1.3% for each country. The rest of the countries are under 0.5%. User trends and sessions over the past years can be seen in the chart below. Website life4me.plus 600’000 493’000 500’000 400’000 297’000 300’000 249’000 200’000 159’000 100’000 60’100 31’600 0 2017 2018 2019 Users Sessions App Every year we improve our application and this year we have released several updates: 9 on iOS and 12 on Android. Among these updates we also incorporated updates with new languages. During the year we have translated our application into Portuguese, Romanian, Georgian and Arabic. At the moment we have 14 languages. The number of users grows each year and this year we had 11’111 users as at December 31st 2019, 44% more than last year (7’705 users in 2018). Last year’s update incorporated the expansion of Application functionality and adding the PrEP category. This year we have prepared an animation video showing how this category is used. You can find the video on our YouTube channel under the link https://youtu.be/aHFm84xBNAs Core activities 9 Campaign We used the opportunity of the European AIDS conference in Basel (EACS 2019) to carry out an extensive and broad public HIV/AIDS awareness campaign with a focus on the whole of Europe. We established the website www.nostigma.ch with over 2'300 visitors during the campaign. Different events were organised to create public awareness about HIV and lead the fight against discrimination towards people living with HIV. The highlight of the campaign was the Demonstration and March against HIV stigma and discrimination attended by more than 300 people. More pictures https://nostigma.ch/en/gallery/ Different videos and radio spots were prepared and reached around 1 million people: • Radio Energy (link) • RadioX (link) • Public transport in Basel (link) • Swiss Radio and Television – SRF (link) • Basel TV – Telebasel (link) Further details of the campaign can be found in Appendix to this report. 10 Projects & Collaborations MENA region We have started a collaboration with the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), which is similar to that with the EECA region (Eastern Europe and Central Asia).