World Bank programme to raise Aids awareness

The World Bank is providing support for a new campaign to help raise awareness of Aids/HIV in Costa Rica.

Prostitutes and other sex industry workers are to be targeted as part of a new initiative from the NGO La Salsa.

The organisation, also known as the Association for the Improvement of Quality of Life of Sexual Workers, is hoping to provide advice and guidance about protection against Aids.

With $50,000 of funding from the World Bank, officials from La Salsa will train 22 prostitutes in Aids/HIV protection with a view to using these women to spread the message to others.

Maria Diaz, project coordinator, told the La Nicion newspaper, that the women will also be taught about their sexual rights.

She hopes that brothel owners and customers will also be influenced by the Aids awareness message, although she acknowledged that this aspect of the project could prove challenging.

"What we want is for the managers to understand the advantages of having their locales free of HIV and for them to promote them as places where they apply preventive practices," Ms Diaz explained.

Figures from the University of California, San Francisco suggest that there were 9,700 people living with HIV/Aids in Costa Rica in 2007. Women over the sage of 15 accounted for 2,700 of this total.

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