What does literacy have to do with HIV?

Literacy is crucial in ensuring people understand and advocate for their treatment needs to be met.

At TALC, literacy is not about a school education and learning your ABC, it is more about ensuring people are treatment literate.

Treatment literacy is an approach that is used to give knowledge to people to ensure they understand as much as possible about ARV therapy, this includes the names and types of drugs, how they work and the importance of a good diet when on treatment - among other things.

To have PLHA that are treatment literate might require increased production of treatment information in English and local languages, workshops and community sensitization projects.

TALC plans to advocate for increased treatment information to accompany the roll out of ART in Zambia.

TALC also has plans to produce some treatment factsheets and we already include treatment information - including information on nutrition and drugs - in our regular newsletter.