MAPUTO, 08 July -- As 40-plus African heads of state and government converge in the Mozambican capital Maputo to attend the African Union Summit on 10-12 July, many among southern Africa's 200 million citizens will be hoping new, more practical solutions can be found to address critical issues such as HIV/AIDS, food insecurity, armed conflict and poverty.

These are the issues currently at the top of national agendas for most countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), one of five regions of the AU.

On 4 July, SADC leaders held a regional summit on HIV/AIDS in Maseru where member states shared views on and restated their political commitment to tackling the pandemic. Southern Africa is the world's worst affected region. Almost two-thirds of all HIV cases in sub-Saharan Africa are believed to be in southern Africa.

Current initiatives, such as the recent Maseru summit, have helped drive home the gravity of the situation, but funding for treatment and mitigation remain in adequate, and with that, the disease continues to ravage especially poor and vulnerable groups in southern Africa.

Against this background, southern African leaders will be hoping for more than just moral support from their African colleagues. The reality on the ground is that affected countries need greater access to food, affordable drugs and other health facilities to prolong lives of those infected and lessen burden on the affected. More international financial support is needed.

The situation in some parts of southern Africa has not been helped by the recent drought that affected six SADC countries -- Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Although the cereal shortage has now improved from last year, significant numbers in these countries remain in need of food aid.

Due to the correlation between hunger and HIV/AIDS, the cereal shortage, the worst in the last 10 years, pushed the region into a deeper emergency situation. However, a swift response by governments, SADC, UN agencies and other parties ensured the problem was mitigated. On the whole, many lessons were learnt that can be shared with other African countries to avoid a problem of similar magnitude in future.

With regards to armed conflict, southern Africa, though perhaps more peaceful than ever before, still has its own political flash points. The fragile peace process in the Democratic Republic of Congo is among the conflicts that are going to be discussed here. Buoyed by what now appears to be holding peace in Angola, SADC sees lasting peace in the DRC as not too distant.

Africa's armed conflicts have repeatedly been cited as the worst impediment to development on the continent. Thus conflict resolution has fittingly dominated discussions during preliminary meetings of the AU summit over the past one week.

Collective fight against poverty, the driving motive behind the formation of organizations such as SADC at the regional level and the AU at the continental level, remains the fundamental challenge. It is a problem that African people have lived with for too long.

Critiques say poverty in Africa is the source of most of its problems, and vice versa. For southern Africa, many see a critical role for the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) in bringing about positive socio-economic growth and development.

NEPAD, the AU framework for development, subscribes to the UN millennium development goals, which among other targets aim to halve the number of people living in poverty by 2015.

How the AU's 52 members hope to achieve this and other critical objectives will be the subject of discussions in Maputo over the next few days. (SARDC)

SARDC has been reporting on SADC from a regional perspective since 1990. SANF can be reproduced in print or broadcast with credit to SARDC and the author.