Activists “watching” African leaders

At last year’€™s World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, activists staged a demonstration sporting a giant eyeball on which were written the words ‘€œWe Are Watching ‘€“ Fund the fight against HIV and TB’€, to remind world leaders of their commitments to funding health and universal access to HIV prevention, treatment and care.

Today activists from more than 10 African countries will once again stage a demonstration as the final activity in a three-day civil society forum that will lay out a long-term plan for regional advocacy on these issues.

This demonstration has been planned to convey the message to regional and global leaders that their backtracking on universal access and other health commitments is not only a slap in the face to people in the African region, but an unwise public health and economic decision, as economies cannot prosper unless their citizens are healthy.

A memo detailing civil society’€™s concerns will be handed over to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria’€™s director of external relations, as well as the Tanzanian government’€™s Commissioner of Health, who will convey these messages at the World Economic Forum.

Numerous reports in the past year have highlighted, the HIV response in the sub-Saharan African region is under threat. This poses an immense risk to maternal and child health in the region, and could result in devastating destabilisation of broader health and socio-economic programmes.

Political hostility towards sustained scale-up of HIV funding is intensifying at the global level, although the 2010 target of universal access to HIV prevention, treatment and care has not even been halfway met.

As a result, the lives of more than 10 million people who are still in need of treatment are in jeopardy. The lack of funding for HIV is a critical element of a much bigger problem related to inadequate resources for health in the region.

The US President’€™s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the largest bilateral supporter of HIV programs in the African region, is also resisting the expansion of PEPFAR-funded treatment programs due to concerns about long-term financial implications. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, arguably the most successful multilateral global funding initiative to date and one that has supported most of the progress achieved on these three diseases in the past few years, faces jeopardy if at least US$20-billion is not pledged by donors to support its replenishment in October 2010.

Donors are now placing emphasis on the responsibility of national governments, arguing that country ownership is critical for sustained progress in the fight against HIV. This is not a new or foreign argument ‘€“ African heads of state committed in the 2001 Abuja declaration to: ‘€œplacing the fight against HIV/AIDS at the forefront and as the highest priority issue in our respective national development plans’€¦ for the first quarter of the 21st century.’€

Related to this commitment was a pledge to ‘€œset a target of allocating at least 15% of our annual budget to the improvement of the health sector’€ ‘€“ a target that almost all countries have failed to achieve.

Health systems in many countries in the region are languishing, while the advancement of HIV treatment programs has been overwhelmingly reliant on donor support. Despite this, at the African Union’€™s annual Conference of Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development in March 2010, a decision was taken to omit budgetary targets ‘€“ including the Abuja 15% target ‘€“ from the official meeting resolutions, arguing that heads of state had made a ‘€˜colossal mistake’€™ in setting these targets, activists said.

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  • healthe

    Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews

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