Leadership failures, cowardice, denial and avoidance have all contributed to the exploding pandemic. Lewis, Annan’s Africa HIV/AIDS envoy, says: “For 20 years African leadership was largely silent, in denial... traumatized, paralyzed .... The Western world, which had the resources and knew how to deal with the pandemic... contributed a negligible quantity of money to Africa. In the process 17 million lives were lost and 25 million people were already infected. It is one of the most astonishing moral lapses in post-war history.”
In December 2001 a WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health; Investing in Health for Economic Development, chaired by Harvard Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, reported that massive investment in global health will save 8 million lives a year and generate at least $360 billion annually within 15 years. The report argues that there are very powerful links among health, poverty reduction and economic growth.
Taking action...empowering women
Key to empowering women are policies that aim to decrease the gender gap in education, improve women’s access to economic resources, increase women’s political participation, protect women from violence and enable them to achieve their rights to sexual and reproductive health and self-determination. Empowering women is key to challenging the pandemic. Women have developed a serious set of blueprints for addressing inequality; now governments need to implement the recommendations laid out in such key documents as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing Platform for Action. These need to become the guiding framework in the development of all HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care strategies.
Signs of hope
With partial debt relief and strong government leadership, Uganda has already reduced the HIV prevalence rate in pregnant women from a high of 29.5% in 1992 to 11.25% in 2000. Lewis makes a powerful argument against helplessness and hopelessness: "We know how to turn the disease around and we have the capacity at this moment to prolong and improve the lives of millions and to prevent the infection from spreading to other millions and at the heart of it is largely the question of resources which still isn’t resolved. It can be done ... it is just a matter of fashioning the will and the commitment to do it.”
