Gideon Byamugisha

Byamugisha claims that he never felt guilty about his status. "The only regret I have is that I lacked information. I have all this education—two degrees, one first class—but I failed a HIV test." However, in 1996 he fell ill and lost 40 pounds because he had no access to antiretroviral drugs (ARVs). Told that he would only live 6 months without ARVs, the bishop of Kampala used the church network to find two donors (an American and a Singaporean) who began sending him the drugs in 1997.

Byamugisha also collaborated in 2003 with photographer Gideon Mendel on the book A Broken Landscape: HIV & AIDS in Africa.

Byamugisha co-founded the African Network of Religious Leaders Living with and Personally Affected HIV and Aids (ANERELA+) in February 2002, and in 2006 started a shelter for orphans of AIDS victims. He lives with his wife and three HIV negative children.

Byamugisha has become prominent in the international HIV/AIDS community. He has worked as an advisor to World Vision and has travelled internationally to speak about HIV/AIDS, including to a conference at the US White House in December 2002. Byamugisha advocates the view that HIV related issues reveal problems in other areas of society, such as poverty, literacy rates, social inequality, gender relations, trade, and government policy. Fixing these issues, he claims, will have a significant effect on the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Byamugisha lives with his HIV positive wife Pamela (who runs a hardware store), with one HIV negative daughter from his previous marriage, Patience, and two HIV negative daughters, Love and Gift, whom he had with Pamela. The couple decided to have Love and Gift after drugs to prevent transmission of the virus from mother to child became available in 2000.

In 1998, Byamugisha began to feel the need to organise the religious community with personal ties to HIV/AIDS. In 2002, he secured funds to host a meeting of the religious leaders who had come to him privately in the past, and 42 leaders met with him in the Collins Hotel, in Nyanga Hills, some 300 km outside Harare. Eight of the participants were HIV+, and this group later became the African Network of Religious Leaders Living with and Personally Affected HIV and Aids (ANERELA+), and grew to more than 2000 members in 39 countries by the end of 2006.

In 1990, Byamugisha's his first wife Kellen gave birth to his daughter, Patience, and both parents had been accepted to study at graduate programs in Britain. These plans changed when Kellen developed chest pains in April 1991, dying a week later. Six months later, Byamugisha learned that his wife had died of AIDS.

Byamugisha does not know where he contracted the virus. He and his wife were not tested before their marriage, and in 1988 he had been in a serious bicycling accident which required injections and a blood transfusion at a time when medical supplies and blood were not routinely screened for HIV.

Reverend Canon Gideon Byamugisha (born 1959) is an Anglican priest in Uganda with a parish outside of Kampala. In 1992, he became the first religious leader in Africa to publicly announce that he was HIV positive. In 2009, Byamugisha received the 26th annual Niwano Peace Prize "in recognition of his work to uphold the dignity and human rights of people living with HIV/AIDS".