Friday, March 29, 2024

Cultural norms blamed for low use of female condoms

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An unidentified women jostles for free condoms
An unidentified women jostles for free condoms

Zambia Civil Society Health Partnership has attributed the low use of female condoms by women partly to some cultural norms of some men.

Zambia Civil Society Health Partnership Executive Director, Christine Kapampa said some men accuse their wives of being unfaithful to them when they suggest that they use female condoms in their homes.

Ms. Kapampa said the other factor inhibiting the use of female condoms is lack of sensitization especially in rural areas.

She added that some women in rural areas do not even know what a female condom is.

Ms. Kapampa further attributed the low usage of female condoms to lack of funds by the organisation to conduct awareness campaigns on the matter in the rural communities.

She said female condoms are not readily available as compared to the male condoms.

She further said the Zambia Bureau of Standards (ZABS) lacks the capacity to test the female condoms coming in the country.

Ms. Kapampa said although her organisation was facing numerous challenges, it will continue to sensitise women in reproductive health.

She said awareness on the use of female condoms will contribute to the reduction on the spread of HIV and sexually transmitted infections.

She said the reduction of HIV/AIDS was one the objectives to achieve Millennium Development Goals of 2015.

5 COMMENTS

  1. My life was ruined by christianity. Help coping?
    I was raised by christians and went to christian school. Everything christians believe was taught to me as 100% fact, I had never had secularly raised friends, and no one ever told me “this is what I believe, but other people believe different things”. At the age of 18 I stopped believing in god. I’m 19 now, and I find it unbearable to live with the knowledge that I was a christian for the first 18 years of my life. Being a christian for 18 years devastatingly retarded my development socially, sexually, intellectually, and everything I was taught was taught with a severe Christian bias with distortion of facts. I lost what should have been the best years of my life to something that not only would I have never ever chosen to believe in…

    • Well, X-Christian, I have no idea about the kind of mission or church you went to, but what you have described draws resemblance to the experiences of the native people in Canada. Like your situation, the native people here had their children taken away from the and education in Christian boarding schools so that they could change and adopt the European value. This went on for a long time and was only completely abolished, I believe, in that late 70s. Today, the scars of poor Christian teaching and verbal and physical abuse has resulted into a very poor relationship between the native community and the rest of the nation.

      Similarly, X, there’s nothing wrong with Christianity or any other world religion. In fact, had they handled the situation way, you would have come out a better…

  2. …..myself, but it affected every corner of my life 100% negatively. I feel like I’m 1 year old but in an aged, tired body. I did not get a good education, the fear of hell was instilled in me very young, I was taught to hate everyone who didn’t think like me, and I experienced no love from people (people loved me for believing in their god, not for me) that I desperately needed growing up. I know that I can’t change the past, and the biggest fear I have is that if an afterlife really exists, I will suffer the loss of my first 18 years of a normal life and development like everyone else got for eternity.
    How can I improve the quality of my life?

  3. My dear,

    My suggestion is that you should look elsewhere for the root cause of your problems. I doubt very much that it is Christianity. The vast majority of us who were born in Zambia had the same experience you had. But everyone reaches an age where they start to think for themselves regardless of what their parents taught them. That is the point in life when one decides to remain a Christian or flush that ideology down the toilet. The choice is yours and you are in full control of your life.

    Good luck to you and may the winds of good fortune blow on your backside.

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