About Ritshidze
Over the past decade, South Africa’s HIV response has come a long way — from the dark days of AIDS denialism under then President Thabo Mbeki, to the establishment of the world’s largest treatment programme. However, this achievement only reflects half of the story. The full picture of South Africa also reveals that nearly 2 million people living with HIV are still not on lifesaving HIV treatment — either never having known their HIV status, or more worryingly having started on treatment and then stopped. South Africa’s failure to make sufficient progress towards the UNAIDS scaled up 95-95-95 targets can be directly linked back to the crisis in our clinics.
Ritshidze was developed and designed in response to this crisis — and is now the world’s largest community-led monitoring system. It was developed and is being implemented by organisations representing people living with HIV—including the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the National Association of People Living with HIV (NAPWA), Positive Action Campaign, Positive Women’s Network (PWN) and the South African Network of Religious Leaders Living with and affected by HIV/AIDS (SANERELA+)—in alliance with Health Global Access Project (Health GAP), and the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR).
Ritshidze monitoring takes place on a quarterly basis at more than 450 clinics and community healthcare centres across 25 districts in 8 provinces in South Africa. Facilities chosen cover nearly half of all people living with HIV on treatment in the country, with a focus on sites with large treatment cohorts and where data shows poor linkage and retention rates.







Ritshidze is supported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), USAID, and UNAIDS to engage in community-led monitoring in South Africa.



