Arm’s Reach Care is a pioneering community care project focused on strengthening care provided in the home. Arms Reach Care creates a network of community health workers and nurses to provide enrollees a wider range of high quality, lower cost care at home. The central philosophy of Arm’s Reach Care, “Everyone A Caregiver,” emphasizes providing maximum care at or as close to home as possible.

The AIDS epidemic has destroyed the fabric of the African community and many households are headed by grandmothers caring for 5 or more orphans. In order to help a sick child recover completely it is important to supplement the medicines with food and nutrition. Since these grandmothers do not have a permanent source of income and struggle against odds to provide regular food or support to the family, we realized early in our work that if we were to succeed in making a real difference in the lives of all the HIV+ children we had to make sure the grandmothers had a regular source of income.

With a series of small grants, we have launched an innovative comprehensive project in Lusaka, Zambia, in partnership with a number of local organizations and communities. This integrated HIV project is envisaged as a pilot to be eventually replicated in urban and rural Zambia. While the pilot project is targeted toward children, the scaling up phase will target children and the general population. In Zambia there are a total of 10 hospices (of which 7 are fully functional) for providing free palliative/in-patient care for terminally ill clinical AIDS cases. For the most part, the hospices are run by medium-large NGOs with per hospice capital costs of $100,000+, and operating costs in the $400-$600/bed/month range. The number of HIV infected children in Zambia is over 100,000 in Zambia and around 30,000 in the city of Lusaka. There are a total of 15 hospice beds specifically for (the 30,000) children with clinical AIDS across Lusaka.