"Gogo" is a traditional healer, activist and outreach worker for HIV and women’s rights. She established the South African Positive Women Ambassadors center in two small wooden outbuildings next to her home in KwaGudukazi outside Durban. Well known in the rural community in which she lives and works, she is also a prominent civil society voice at conferences, as well as being an unembarrassable purveyor of condoms and sex tips during her outreach visits to some of the 28,000 people in the area and the schools she visits.

She says: “I'm focused on the problem of gender-based violence and work with the community to try and change practices. Now even men are coming to me with questions about rape.”

“Gender-based violence is the main contributing factor to the spread of HIV in this community. Men are taught to have multiple partners, and women don’t have the power to tell men to use a condom”. - “Gogo” Silungile Mtambo
Gogo says that early data she has gathered from the home visits she makes around KwaGudukazi show that over 70% of the community is living with HIV. She says: “There are lots of taverns here and people are unemployed, drinking and having sex. A holistic approach to ending HIV is the only thing that will work – testing and treating is pointless without adherence counselling.”