Anders Larson

@thisisanders.eurosky.social

782 Followers 1361 Following

Chronically ill legal professional | Occasional expert | American | British | European Echter Wiener | Citoyen | Philadelphian European Federalist | #Renaissance | #Libdems

A city overview of Vienna from the perspective of someone laying down with their shoes Infront of them

Mercedes Benz city in Dubai.

Nineteen-year-old Sharon Akoth, orphaned at age 12 and living in Kenya’s Kisumu County, was one of the beneficiaries. “It’s through the DREAMS program that they gave me a school uniform, shoes, and they provided me with food, which I took home,” she says, noting that it also distributed menstrual hygiene products because few of the girls could afford to buy them.

Then the funding stopped. In Washington, D.C., the DREAMS termination was framed as a pragmatic trade-off: treatment and HIV testing could continue, even if prevention programs were scaled back, writes Victoria Amunga for Devex.

For Akoth, her own dreams of becoming a doctor were quickly derailed. Without the program, she dropped out of school and was forced to have sex with men to financially survive. She met a man, hoping he would help her buy sanitary towels and continue her education, but she became pregnant. When he learned of the pregnancy, she says, he left.

There is no movement in the U.S. government to revive the DREAMS program, according to a former State Department employee. Yet several of the administration’s stated priorities — including expanding access to new HIV treatments and reducing mother-to-child transmission — are unlikely to be met without the prevention and support systems DREAMS once provided.