Aids activists are angry that six months after Côte d’Ivoire received a $91-million grant to fight the disease, not a penny of the money has been spent on actual projects to fight the spread of HIV or help those living with Aids.
A first tranch of $28-million from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis was finally made available to the Ivorian government in December last year after being held up by several months of infighting between different ministries over who would get to spend it.
But the representative of one Ivorian NGO involved in the fight against Aids complained: ”Projects have been submitted to the committee that is coordinating how the funds will be spent, but nothing has been done yet.”
Anxious not to spoil his organisation’s own chances of getting some of the money, he asked that he and his group should not be named.
The representative of another Ivorian Aids NGO, who was equally unwilling to be named, pointed out that Côte d’Ivoire had also received $2,5-million to fight Aids from the United States and $760 000 from Belgium over the past year, but this money too had yet to be spent.
”The Aids epidemic is getting more money that anything else in Côte d’Ivoire , but you can’t see its impact on the ground,” he complained.
Cyriaque Ako, of the Ivorian Network of People Living with HIV/Aids, meanwhile protested that virtually all Aids-related spending in Côte d’Ivoire is on prevention strategies and very little is done actually to help people living with the disease and prevent them from passing it on.
”For a long time the fight against Aids in Côte d’Ivoire has been focused on prevention and has left on the sidelines the people who have already got Aids and who continue to infect others out of ignorance,” he said.
Questioned about these criticisms, Clement Kouakou, a spokesperson for the Global Fund’s programme coordinating committee in Côte d’Ivoire, said everything was still going according to plan.
”We are at the stage of selecting projects. The funds were disbursed [to Côte d’Ivoire] in December 2003. We have had to set ourselves up and we can’t go faster than the NGOs and associations will allow us to. By the end of this month at the latest, the NGOs and associations chosen [for funding] will be known,” he said.
An official of the Ministry for the Fight against Aids pointed out that the government had been given two years to spend the money which it had received from the Global Fund.
”The committee is doing its job and we think we will achieve the results we have been asked to produce within the 17 months we have left,” he said.
Côte d’Ivoire, which has been split in two by a civil war that erupted two years ago, is believed to have the highest rate of Aids infection in West Africa. According to the Ministry of Health, 10% of the country’s 16-million population is HIV-positive.
Several recent indicators suggest that the situation is growing worse.
Christine Nebou Adjobi, the Minister for Aids, said recently that a study by Retrovirus Côte d’Ivoire showed that 14% of all pregrant women in the country are HIV-positive. She also revealed that young people aged between 15 and 24 account for 68% of all new infections recorded.
Delivering a speech in the official capital, Yamoussoukro, 260km north of Abidjan, Adjobi also revealed that five teachers a week are dying from Aids in Côte d’Ivoire — about 250 a year.
An official of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) in Côte d’Ivoire drew attention to the high risk of HIV infection faced by hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced from their homes by the civil war. For nearly two years rebel forces have controlled the northern half of the country.
He also complained that Aids is still viewed socially as a shameful illness that people are unwilling to own up to and talk about publicly. He pointed out that in Uganda, HIV infection rates only started to go down when people living with Aids began identifying themselves publicly and giving advice to the rest of the population.
But Alain Manouan, the programme director of UNAids in Côte d’Ivoire, was more upbeat. He said public awareness campaigns have led to more and more people volunteering to be tested for Aids and this process is pushing up the numbers who are known to be HIVpositive.
According to the Ministry of Health, 30 000 Ivorians have tested positive for HIV so far this year. Officials declined to say how many people have tested negative for the virus, which eventually leads to the onset of Aids-related diseases. — Irin