AIDS prevention remains a priority for SADC

      Although major efforts have been mobilized to combat AIDS throughout southern Africa, the pandemic is still raging and poses a growing threat to regional economic development. 

      The challenges of AIDS to development on the continent was the main is-sue during the Africa Development Forum 2000 in Addis Ababa last December, when African leaders reiterated their commitment to fight the pandemic.

      On the last day of the meeting, leaders stressed the important role of a national campaign of morality, involving all social sectors under government leader-ship. President Festus Mogae of Botswana called upon his colleagues to deal with the HIV/AIDS epidemic as an emergency and respond with measures that a crisis deserves.
      Mogae also suggested that an appeal be made to developed countries to convince major pharmaceutical countries to reduce the cost of anti-AIDS drugs. 
      However, Graça Machel warned African governments not to allow the scarcity of resources to impede efforts.
      She said the continent must mobilize its own resources to fight AIDS. 
      “The truth of the matter is that over the past decades we have heard many promises from the international community to provide billions of dollars to assist the development efforts of Africa.
      Only too often those promises have not been kept or the assistance has been given in ways that undermine rather than support us,” Machel said. 
      The scourge has caused serious set-backs to national economic growth in some southern African countries. The Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey (ZDHS) Report for 1999 recently re-leased in Harare by the Central Statistical Office shows that one child in 10 born after 1995 will not reach the age of five because of the worsening economic conditions and the impact of AIDS.
      This report concluded that increased poverty has exposed many children to malnutrition and infectious diseases, such as diarrhea and malaria. AIDS is the aggravating 

strikes deeply at the most productive sectors. 
      In Botswana, AIDS is likely to carve 20 percent off government’s budget and reduce the income of the poor by 13 per-cent. Life expectancy at birth is now estimated to be 44 in-stead of the average of 69 before AIDS be-came the country’s greatest killer.
      In South Africa, a report by the department of education reveals that one in four university undergraduate, one in eight postgraduate and one in five technical students is HIV-positive.
      The report urges renovation of the education system, including hiring back retired teachers to replace those who have died.
      AIDS has also affected the private sector through lost productivity and the need to spend more on hiring inexperienced workers and retraining others as their labour force becomes sick. Companies must also pay more for insurance and medical care. 

      However, the World Economic Forum’s Africa Competitiveness Report 2000/1 reveals that HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns are not creating sufficient impact on the private sector.
      According to this report, a majority of business leaders surveyed in 30 African countries believed AIDS will have an impact on productivity in such areas as 

 percent by 2010. 
      In Botswana, UNAIDS estimates the HIV prevalence rate to be 36 percent of the working age population.
      The UN figures also show that 3.8 million people became infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa last year, bringing the total number of people living with AIDS to 25.3 million. At the same time, 2.4 million people died of AIDS in Africa.
      African countries have battled the secretive, western-dominated pharmaceutical industry to make drugs affordable to African national budgets.
      However, the industry and many western governments argue that those companies sell drugs at high prices in order to recover research and development costs.
      Many of the drugs, critics charge, have been improperly tested or are being tested on humans for the first time in Africa.
      Some of them are known to have serious, sometimes fatal, side effects and are not effective to the strains of HIV prevalent in the sub-Saharan Africa.
      Lack of resources nourishes the pandemic in the region, making any poverty eradication programme have, as its highest priority a strategy to deal with AIDS.
      Because there is no cure yet for the fatal disease, this strategy must focus on effective prevention.

By Renato Pinto

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