Ghana must revive HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns to protect workforce, says RRIG chief

In Kumasi, Aba Oppong sits across from a reporter and describes a problem that has become invisible by virtue of its silence. As executive director of Rights and Responsibilities Initiatives Ghana, she has watched the country's HIV/AIDS awareness landscape shift from saturated—billboards, radio spots, public service announcements everywhere—to nearly absent. The disease has not gone away. The misconceptions have multiplied.

Ghana's health system has accomplished real things. Testing is more accessible now than it was. Treatment is more available. But somewhere in that progress, the public conversation stopped. People stopped hearing about HIV/AIDS on their radios and seeing it discussed in their communities. The absence of messaging created its own message: that the disease was solved, or no longer relevant, or perhaps never as serious as people once believed. Some Ghanaians now think HIV/AIDS has effectively disappeared. Others attribute it to supernatural causes—evil spiritual forces rather than biological transmission. These are not abstract misunderstandings. They shape behavior. They shape who gets tested and who avoids testing out of fear or denial.

Oppong points to a troubling reality: children as young as fifteen are contracting HIV. The Ashanti Region, where she spoke, carries a substantial burden of people living with the virus. Young people are becoming infected at rates that suggest the protective knowledge their parents' generation absorbed through relentless public campaigns has not been passed down. The vigorous nationwide education efforts that once defined Ghana's response to the epidemic have faded. What replaced them is a vacuum.

The reasons for revival are practical as well as urgent. Ghana now has tools that did not exist when those earlier campaigns ran. Social media reaches young people directly. Radio stations proliferate across the country. Schools could embed comprehensive sexual health education into their curricula. Parents could talk to their children about risk. The infrastructure for awareness exists. What is missing is the will to use it at scale.

Oppong also names something less visible but equally consequential: stigma. People living with HIV often do not disclose their status because they fear discrimination. That silence means fewer people get tested voluntarily. It means the disease spreads through networks of people who do not know they are infected. Breaking that silence requires public messaging that normalizes testing, that separates a person's worth from their viral status, that frames disclosure not as shame but as responsibility.

She calls on Ghana's health institutions—the Ghana Health Service, the Ghana AIDS Commission, and others—to resurrect the intensity of earlier campaigns. She calls on schools to teach young people accurately about prevention. She calls on parents to have difficult conversations. She calls on Ghanaians broadly to reject the stigma that keeps people hidden and to adopt practices—regular testing, safe sex, support for the affected—that slow transmission. The workforce Ghana needs to build its future depends on a generation that does not carry this burden. That requires speaking about it again, loudly and everywhere, until the silence breaks.