“The South African business sector fully endorses and supports Government’s HCT campaign, its targets and the keen focus on HIV prevention,” says Brad Mears, the CEO of the SA Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS (SABCOHA).

After consultations with over 140 South African business representatives and service providers, SABCOHA is now releasing the draft Business Sector Strategy to support the National HCT Campaign.

Key components of the strategy are: Advocacy and Communication, Social mobilization and Leadership, Implementation and Testing and Monitoring and Reporting.

The strategy includes extensive plans to improve the business sectors’ monitoring and reporting in relation to HIV/AIDS. SABCOHA is planning to provide a web-based HCT reporting tool for the business sector. Through this system companies and private health service providers will be able to report and download output data by province, district and industry. The tool is planned to go live in July 2010.

SABCOHA also commits to provide technical M&E assistance to companies and private health service providers,  analyse and report progress made towards achieving business sector targets as well as share business sector stories of lessons learned and achievements.

Read more

By: Johanna Löfgren, Manager AIDS Accountability Business Ranking

Photo: Irin

South Africa – home to the one-sixth of the world’s population living with HIV – today unveiled an ambitious campaign to prevent and treat the virus, a move hailed by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

The drive seeks to test 15 million people for HIV by next year, a six-fold jump in just two years, as well as reach 1.5 million people with antiretroviral treatment by June 2011, up from 1 million last year.

Nearly 6 million people – or 18 per cent of all adults – in South Africa live with HIV, the largest population of people in the world.

“South Africa can break the trajectory of the HIV epidemic,” said Michel Sidibé, UNAIDS Executive Director, who, along with some 2,000 other people, attended the drive’s launch by President Jacob Zuma in Gauteng province, in the country’s north.

“This campaign promises to be the equivalent of ‘truth and reconciliation’ for the country’s AIDS response,” he said, referring to efforts to heal the country after the end of apartheid.

Read full article from the UN News Centre

Photo:Irin

A psychiatric diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder fosters stigma and discrimination, escalating vulnerability of transgender persons to social exclusion and disease.

The Global Forum on MSM & HIV (MSMGF) recommends a rights-based and person-centered approach to developing guidelines that will help transgender persons receive non-discriminatory, non-judgmental and quality health care. There has been an international wave of advocacy calling on authorities such as the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and World Health Organization (WHO) to depathologize transgender identities. Pathologizing gender identity variance as a ‘psychiatric disorder’ only perpetuates the stigma, discrimination and violence that these individuals experience around the world.

Read full article from Aidsportal

Photo: Irin

After getting millions of dollars to fight AIDS, some African countries responded by slashing their health budgets, new research says. For years, the international community has forked over billions in health aid, believing the donations supplemented health budgets in poor countries. It now turns out development money prompted some governments to spend on entirely different things, which cannot be tracked. The research was published Friday in the medical journal Lancet.
Experts analyzed all available data for government spending on health in poor countries and the aid they received. International health aid jumped from about $8 billion in 1995 to almost $19 billion in 2006, with the United States being the biggest donor.

Most countries in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East doubled their health budgets. But many in Africa - including those with the worst AIDS outbreaks - trimmed their health spending instead. In the Lancet study, for every dollar received from donors, poor countries transferred up to $1.14 originally slated for their health budgets elsewhere.

Read full article in the Washington Post

Photo: Irin

For the first time in decades, researchers are reporting a significant drop worldwide in the number of women dying each year from pregnancy and childbirth, to about 342,900 in 2008 from 526,300 in 1980. Children were weighed by nurses and staff at the Mygome Orphanage in Khartoum, Sudan, in 2008.

The findings, published in the medical journal The Lancet, challenge the prevailing view of maternal mortality as an intractable problem that has defied every effort to solve it.

“The overall message, for the first time in a generation, is one of persistent and welcome progress,” the journal’s editor, Dr. Richard Horton, wrote in a comment accompanying the article, published online on Monday.

The study cited a number of reasons for the improvement: lower pregnancy rates in some countries; higher income, which improves nutrition and access to health care; more education for women; and the increasing availability of “skilled attendants” — people with some medical training — to help women give birth. Improvements in large countries like India and China helped to drive down the overall death rates.

Read full article from The New York Times

Dear Member of the AIDS Accountability Expert Panel,

Welcome to your page on AAI’s website!

This is where you will find updated information on AAI’s research development, and participate in online consultations.

We are very pleased to announce the Panel Activity Plan for this year:

Research Agenda & Panel Activities 2010 (pdf)

It is our hope that this page will be an interactive forum for information exchange and debate. We therefore encourage you to provide feedback or pose questions in between the scheduled consultations. To submit a comment on a text posted here you simply click on the headline and type your comment in the comment space.

We at AAI very much look forward to working with you this year!

Best wishes

Johanna Löfgren

BRUSSELS, 07/04/10: On World Health Day 2010, a new report from Action for Global Health urges EU leaders to commit 0.1% of GNI to ensure universal access to healthcare for people in developing countries.

The report ‘2010 Reality Check: Time is Running Out to Meet the Health Millennium Development Goals’ urges European leaders to focus on 3 issues which can break the cycle of poverty and ill health in developing countries.

“Time is running out but EU leaders can still make a difference. They must recognise the importance of health for development and come forward with the necessary money”, said Marielle Hart, Stop Aids Alliance.

In September, world leaders will meet for the UN MDG Review Summit - a check-up for the 8 Millennium Development Goals they committed to ten years ago. With only 5 years left to go until the MDGs deadline of 2015, the signs are worrying at best.

Read more (Action for Global Health)

UK based One World Trust has examined how NGOs address the accountability challenges they face in particular when engaging in advocacy and explains some of the strengths and weaknesses of existing self-regulation. The study is built on a world-wide survey of civil society self-regulatory initiatives.

It shows some quite worrying results. There is only a quite limited level of self-regulation developed in the field of advocacy by NGOs, and  also it is weak with very few commitments being translated into measurable indicators that would allow effective policing of standards.

Johanna Löfgren, Manager AIDS Accountability Business Ranking Initiative