Kids reading about BONELA.

I was awarded a fellowship by the Open Society Institute to go to Gaborone Botswana and assist the NGO, Botswana Network on Ethics Law and HIV/AIDS (BONELA), with developing materials for a treatment literacy campaign. BONELA's "...mission is to create and enable a just environment for those infected and affected by HIV and AIDS." People in Botswana face discrimination when they are identified as being infected by the HIV/AIDS virus, which discourages regular testing or disclosure and can result in job loss. BONELA travels across Botswana, which has one of the highest infection rates in Africa, to prevent these ramifications and provide support to people.

I arrived at BONELA for the first of four weeks and began familiarizing myself with their needs and operations. I sat in on meetings and was also able to go a on a training session in Kanye a couple hours drive outside the capitol.

The location of my office at BONELA.

Training meeting in Kanye.

I began working with BONELA's Treatment Literacy office on a poster campaign to encourage people to seek treatment from doctors, take their treatment regularly, report side effects from treatment, and talk to family members about their health. We decided it would be effective to depict a real person in these situations and began to think of it as a mini graphic novel with a single character.

A regular poster format had proved to be the best mode for distribution in past campaigns. It was evident that BONELA lacked the visual material and photographs in house to produce the poster, so I began setting up photo shoots in order to obtain the visuals needed for the poster.

Initial design sketch.

1st Mockup of Poster

Obtaining visual assets at a doctors office.

Obtaining visual assets at a doctors office.

Kennedy agreed to be the figure in the poster.

Working with an uncalibrated monitor apart from the printer.

Printer proofs.

Choosing the final version.

Final version 1.

Final version 2.

After the poster and image bank I provided, I designed some additional materials for the organization including an identity for the Treatment Literacy office, and a pamphlet highlighting the rights of children who are infected by HIV/AIDS.

New identity for the treatment literacy office.

Children's rights pamphlet using existing illustrations.