Forbes: Paying Women To Go to Free HIV Clinics

Why are we paying African women to go to free HIV clinics? Learn more in this Forbes article about New Incentives.

Some of the highlights:

Svetha Janumpalli thinks you can save a child for the cost of a pair of shoes. The 26-year-old, who was named on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list this year, is moving to Nigeria from San Francisco in two weeks time to prove her point. For the past few years Janumpalli has been building New Incentives, an organization that pays people in poverty small sums of money regularly to go to an HIV clinic…

Starting with a pilot program paying families to send their children to school in India, Janumpalli is now focusing New Incentive’s limited resources on preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV in Nigeria. The country accounts for 30% of mother-to-child HIV transmission and 70% of people live on less than a dollar a day. The women get a small payment everytime they’ve received a treatment in a clinic…

One of the great “aid myths” according to Janumpalli is that we’ve got to build more and more clinics and schools. Instead she’s focusing on clinics that are being underused.

“There’s tons of empty clinics and schools all around the world,” she says. People know the clinics are free and are aware of them, but everything else in their life – feeding their children, cultural and religious distrust of the clinic – is preventing them from making the trip there, says Janumpalli.

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