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'The State of the World's Children 2011 – Adolescence: An Age of Opportunity,' UNICEF’s new flagship report, focuses on the development and rights of more than a billion children aged 10 to 19 worldwide. This series of stories, essays and multimedia features seeks to accelerate and elevate adolescents' fight against poverty, inequality and gender discrimination.

By Shanta Bloemen

GABORONE, Botswana, 31 March 2011 – A first kiss for teenagers is often awkward but heavily romanticized in the recounting. But for Katlego, an energetic and cheerful 18-year-old, it is a painful memory of trust betrayed.

She was at a family party when a boy kissed her. In her excitement, she told her cousin, one of the few people she had trusted with news of her HIV status. The next thing she remembers was the boy’s mother shouting and accusing her of spreading HIV germs to her son.
 
“One of the hardest aspects is thinking you have someone you can trust and then to be stabbed in the back,” says Katlego, who has just finished high school in Gaborone, Botswana’s capital city.

Katlego tested positive for HIV when she was 11. She had become infected as a result of mother-to-child transmission.

She is one of an estimated 2,000 teenagers in Botswana too old to have participated in the country’s national programme to prevent mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV, which began in 1999.

Since then, Botswana – the first country in the region to scale-up PMTCT services on a national level, and the first in sub-Saharan Africa to reach more than 80 percent coverage for such services – has seen a reduction of deaths in children under the age of five.

The PMTCT programme now has a more than 90 percent coverage rate, and aims to reduce the risk of children becoming infected during pregnancy, delivery or breastfeeding even further.

HIV stigma

For teenagers like Katlego, who discover their HIV status when entering adolescence, coming to terms with their HIV status and learning how to cope with a daily regime of medicine for life can be tough.
 
Then there’s the stigma. Even in a country such as Botswana, which – at almost 25 percent – has one of the world’s highest rates of HIV prevalence, discrimination is rife. There is an estimated 16,000 children under the age of 14 living with HIV.

© UNICEF video

Katlego, 18, receives medical treatment at the Botswana-Baylor Children’s Clinical Center of Excellence in Gaborone, Botswana.

“I don’t blame people for being scared of HIV. It scares me and I can understand that,” says Katlego. “Nobody should wish to have this virus and be linked to a life-long disease.”  

The Government of Botswana estimates more than 4,000 teenagers will need anti-retroviral treatment, which helps prevent the virus from multiplying inside the body, over the next couple of years.