Harare, Zimbabwe-(News of the South)-Young people need to delay their sexual debut so as to mitigate against chances of contracting HIV, a senior government official has said.
Health Minister David Parirenyatwa, who opened the HIV Prevention Revitalisation Target Setting meeting in Harare, said despite earlier positive changes that saw young people becoming sexually active at 16 there has been a negative change lately that increased the need to increase the age of consent to 18.
18 is also the legally accepted age of marriage.
“Young people need to delay sexual debut as much as they can”.
“These youths used to start having sex at 16, then it was 16 years and 9 months but of late its coming to our attention that the age is dropping to 11, 10 and even 9 years”.
“So we need to continue talking about this issue so that we marry the age of consent to the age of marriage”, he said.
Zimbabwe has made a lot of headway in the fight to reduce new HIV infections though more can and should be done as the country still has some highly afflicted hotspots, he said.
In his statement Parirenyatwa said there is need to close the gap of new infections.
“More people are living with HIV but what is significant is that the number of new infections is coming down and that’s very nice. We should now count the incidence and not the prevalence”.
“Still let’s look at new innovations and as what more can we do. What have we left out even among those things that we have been doing?’
“Let’s see if we have exhausted all that we have been doing”, he added.
Zimbabwe’s prevalence rate has fallen to 0.48% according to a 2016 ZIMPHIA report but the country still has pockets of high infections such as the Southern parts of the country where prevalence is as high as 20%
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