Protect Your Kids From HIV
A microsite sharing stories and providing resources to reduce mother-to-child HIV transmission in Egypt.
HIV is one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide, with 1.3 million people contracting HIV every year and 629,000 people dying of the disease. HIV is both preventable and treatable, and governments and nonprofits have taken significant strides to reduce the HIV burden in sub-Saharan Africa and other high burden countries, while many predominantly Muslim countries in North Africa, such as Egypt, have received fewer resources to reduce HIV infections due to their comparatively lower disease burden. As a result, the North African region has seen increasing rates of HIV despite decreasing global trends and has some of the lowest testing and treatment rates and highest transmission percentages in the world. I’ve been interested in the experiences of children with HIV since reading a book in middle school that featured an HIV positive protagonist, and I was shocked to find out that Egypt’s mother to child transmission rate was over 30 times higher than it would be with universal implementation of standard treatment. As someone with no medical training and a limited understanding of the medical side of HIV, I wanted to learn more about the non-health factors behind Egypt’s high maternal-to-child transmission rate and explore potential roles for education and information campaigns in improving access to treatment.
Artist
Georgia Hutchinson (2024)
View Protect Your Kids From HIV Microsite
Artist Lens
I chose a microsite as my media project to compile country-specific educational material about HIV in a confidential and easily accessible manner. Due to my positionality as an outsider who doesn’t speak Arabic and is unfamiliar with many of the religions and customs in Egypt, I wanted to approach the project with cultural sensitivity by centering the voices of Egyptians and amplifying the work of local organizations. I decided to design the site for an audience of pregnant mothers since other African countries have achieved considerable success in lowering HIV burden through addressing mother-to-child transmission, with the majority of South Africa’s case reduction being attributable to their mother-to-child transmission initiatives. Since I am an outsider, the goal of my website is not to convince the audience to share my opinion about HIV, but rather to connect the audience with resources and provide them with the necessary information to make informed choices about their and their children’s health. This is especially important given that only 6% of Egyptian women have correct and comprehensive knowledge about HIV. My website uses red accents, the color of the HIV movement, which I balanced with neutral colors in order to make the site feel approachable. Due to the significant presence of HIV stigma in Egypt, I chose to anonymize all stories (keeping with both UNICEF and local media’s customs), so my site mostly uses both graphics and visual art. A potential next step would be to email this site to an Egyptian organization that currently lacks a website and see if they would want to take ownership or adopt aspects of its design in order to further their mission.