As part of the activities to commemorate the 2020 International Condom Day, (ICD), AIDS Healthcare Foundation, (AHF), Nigeria organised a road walk to create awareness for safer sex practices.
The road awareness walk, which had distribution of condoms culminated in free HIV testing in Abuja.
The organisation had earlier stated that 250,000 condoms will be distributed across the states they operate.
The Abuja clinical coordinator for the organisation, Dr. Kema Anthony Onu, said “What we are doing today is to raise the awareness and the consciousness of Nigerians into the use of condoms as a veritable way of preventing HIV and AIDS.”
Onu said, HIV and AIDS prevention requires a lot of processes and one of them is the use of condom.
He said “We are more real than being ideal. Because in an ideal process we will want to use abstinence but with the number of new incidences of HIV infection we get annually we need to come to terms with the reality that condoms are a veritable means of HIV prevention”.
The ICD is an informal event usually observed on February 13th ahead of the Valentine’s Day to promote safer sex awareness.
This year’s the organisation marked it long standing tradition with a series of event from 12th to 14th under the rallying cry “Safer is Fun”.
It presented a survey result on “Condom accessibility and use in Nigeria.”
The survey conducted by NOIPolls and administered on 1000 respondents across the six geo-political zones showed that, 9 in 10 Nigerians know what a condom is, 84 per cent believe it should be used, but only 34 per cent actually use it.
A National Youth Service Corps member, Ikechukwuka Onyeabor, who was part of the awareness walk said such strategy are impactful as “it is not every time people get access to condoms in a way that does not require stigma or shame”.
