Africa’s cemeteries are ”filled beyond capacity” because of the HIV/Aids pandemic, Ethiopian President Girma Wolde-Giorgis told experts meeting in the capital, Addis Ababa, on Tuesday to discuss combating the spread of the virus.
Opening a session of the Commission on HIV/Aids and Governance in Africa (CHGA), a UN-inspired body set up last year to track the long-term impact of the pandemic in Africa, Wolde-Giorgis said HIV/Aids was fuelling ”social decay” and ”community breakdown” that threatened the very fabric of African society.
The ”CHGA Interactive” meeting brought together leading HIV/Aids experts and African NGOs to discuss the impact of HIV/Aids on Africa’s rural populations.
According to UNAids, an estimated 20-million Africans have died since the start of the HIV/Aids epidemic, some 29,4-million are living with the virus and 25-million children have been orphaned.
The CHGA session heard how HIV/Aids was crippling rural communities in Africa and exacerbating food shortages, with the heaviest burden falling on women.
”HIV/Aids affects food availability by affecting the labour supply,” said Daphne Topouzis, an expert in HIV/Aids and its impact on food security. ”It can affect access to food by eroding household disposable income due to increased expenditure on health.”
Joseph Tumushabe, from Uganda’s Makerere University, warned that over the next 15 years Africa’s agricultural labour force could be decimated by HIV/Aids. He said studies showed that in Namibia up to 26% of the agricultural workforce could die from the virus by 2020. In South Africa a fifth of the workforce could succumb.
Gladys Mutangadura, from the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), added that women needed support to help cope with the impact, including an increased domestic workload, they often had to care for orphans, and girls were taken out of school to help at home.
She noted that women also often lacked the same property rights as men, losing their land if their husbands died from the virus and facing further exclusion. She said women needed greater access to credit, girls needed support to stay in schools and men had to share the growing burden if the impact of HIV/Aids was to be mitigated.
The CHGA meeting coincided with the ECA’s weeklong African Development Forum in Addis Ababa, which will discuss on Thursday the impact of HIV/Aids on Africa’s capacity to govern, and the challenge of scaling up treatment.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan first announced the CHGA initiative in February 2003. It is chaired by Kingsley Amoako, head of the ECA, and includes among its 20 commissioners Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria, Peter Piot, executive director of UNAids, Dr Mamphele Ramphele, managing director of the World Bank, and former Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda.
The discussions at the interactive meeting will feed into a final report on the long-term impact of the pandemic in Africa, due for submission to Annan in June 2005.
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe’s request for funding from the Global Fund to Fight HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria has again been rejected.
Last week Zimbabwe appealed the Fund’s earlier rejection of its HIV/Aids and TB grant proposals. Fund spokesman Tim Clark said on Tuesday that ”sadly, neither of the Zimbabwe appeals was successful”.
In July the Fund turned down proposals from Zimbabwe for HIV/Aids, TB and malaria, ”for technical reasons”. David Parirenyatwa, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Health and Child Welfare, accused the Fund of political bias, something the Global Fund has strongly denied.
Had its proposals been approved, Zimbabwe would have benefited from a $218-million five-year commitment by the Fund. Clark pointed out that Zimbabwe was not the only country to have proposals rejected in July: 36 proposals had been unsuccessful.
There were 13 appeals to the Fund to reconsider country proposals, and ”of these Zimbabwe launched two appeals — it only appealed for two of the disease components (HIV/Aids and TB), and neither of those were successful at appeal,” Clark noted.
As was the case in July, ”technical reasons were given for the failure of the appeals, which were judged by an independent panel, and those reasons will be communicated back to Zimbabwe. So, if they intend to re-lodge the applications in the next round [of proposals], they will have a good idea of what work needs to be done to knock them into shape,” Clark said.
However, Mary Sandasi, the director of a local HIV/Aids group, Women and Aids Support Network, said she believed the Global Fund was ”mixing issues” and had ”a hiddgen agenda”.
”The Global Fund is supposed to be looking at HIV/Aids, TB and malaria, but they are taking up other issues; issues that are to do with the people of Zimbabwe, and that can only be dealt with by Zimbabweans without outside interference,” Sandasi said.
”I think this is the fourth round [of proposals], and we have not received any funding from them. We feel there is a hidden agenda,” she added.
Clark denied any political bias in the Fund’s decision. ”Anybody looking at our portfolio of grants throughout the world will see we have given grants to North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar … to a number of difficult environments throughout the world. I don’t think that, logically, anybody could accuse us of political motivations in our funding decisions,” he said.
He explained that the funding applications ”are all screened by an independent panel; the board of the Global Fund then approves funding on the basis of the recommendations of the independent technical review panel, which is an international review panel that reviews [proposals] for technical efficacy”.
He noted that ”there are two grants that have already been approved to Zimbabwe during the first round in April 2002 — some $14-million for HIV/Aids programmes and a malaria grant for nearly $9-million — and it’s unfortunate the subsequent applications have not been successful”.
The appeal process concluded on 7 October. Three proposals succeeded, one each from Niger, Russia and Uzbekistan. — Irin