“Perspectives matter,” Dr. Thembi Chithenga, a young resident physician at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Blantyre, Malawi says in the opening frame of a short film, Treatment for All: Our Lives, Our Stories, she helped us make about HIV in Malawi. She could not be more correct. Ten years ago, when I began research for my book Our Kind of People, a look into the impact of HIV/AIDS in my home country of Nigeria, the world was a different place. I started my research at the tail end of the “Africa is a place of pain and suffering” narrative,  just at the beginning of the “Africa Rising” narrative that has occupied our perception of the continent for the last ten years. When we first started, HIV was front and center in the minds of development and global public health experts, but the language used to discuss the epidemic on the continent was quite extreme. We were bombarded by western celebrities speaking about masses of people dying. We heard projections about a hopeless and lost generation that would be decimated by HIV and the years of economic productivity that would succumb to the destructive nature of this epidemic. We were afraid. The world was afraid.

What a difference 10 years makes. After ten years of concerted global efforts, the outlook on HIV/AIDS has changed. The messages of death, doom and gloom have been replaced by pictures of HIV as a liveable disease, provided people living with HIV have access to treatment. Now, instead of trying to justify rationing expensive Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART), governments, international bodies, NGOs and pharmaceutical companies have come together to reduce the cost of life-saving HIV medication and, for the first time make possible, the idea that all people diagnosed with HIV can get treatment. We are no longer talking about the death of a continent and instead can speak of the possibility of treatment for all by the year 2030.

But for this to happen, the stories of lives transformed by treatment with all of their complexity, their triumphs and their hardships need to be told to the wider world. I tried to do this through my book Our Kind of People, and now through Ventures Africa, in collaboration with the Presidents Emergency Program for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the United Nations Special Envoy’s Office on Health in Agenda 2030 and for Malaria. Our short film Treatment for All: Our Lives, Our Stories is part of the #TreatmentforAll campaign push to raise awareness about how putting every person diagnosed with HIV on treatment, immediately, can actually reduce HIV prevalence on the African continent and in the wider world. Our team, lead by Managing Editor Maryam Kazeem worked with the director Will Robson-Scott and numerous people in Malawi who shared their experiences and stories to produce a different narrative about HIV and AIDS, one that privileges complexity and nuance while still illuminating hope and the possibility of a long and productive life with access to treatment.

Please watch and share. When people see stories that show just how life becomes more real with access to treatment, the idea that we can beat this epidemic in Africa and across the globe also becomes all the more real.

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