UN Integrated Regional Information Networks - September 12, 2001

The experience in Uganda showed that families, communities, and the civil society were prevented from acting decisively against the HIV/AIDS pandemic by the government policy framework, Ruranga told a UN conference on the merits of volunteerism on Monday, 10 September. That situation could change if civil society united to ensure a holistic and equitable HIV/AIDS policy, which included much greater participation of people living with AIDS, he added.

Uganda and President Yoweri Museveni have been repeatedly lauded for their leadership role in the struggle against HIV/AIDS, and Uganda is among the most successful African countries in the fight against the disease.

Ugandan health officials reported last week that the HIV/AIDS infection rate among pregnant women attending antenatal clinics had fallen significantly over the last two years - from 6.8 percent in 1999 to 6.1 percent at the end of 2000.

This decline in infection rates in pregnant women reflected a general trend of decreased HIV/AIDS infection across the country, according to the director-general of the Uganda AIDS Commission, David Kihumuro-Apuuli.

Ruranga contended that the answer to the problem of HIV/AIDS, which was ravaging Africa, must come from the people through civil society, which implied volunteerism at all levels. However, NGOs were not necessarily supportive of civil society, volunteer workers were often not well educated about rights and liberties, and NGOs remained subservient to government because of funding needs, he said.

In Uganda, according to Ruranga, civil society had developed many of the effective practices for fighting HIV/AIDS, and the government only got involved at a later stage in order to gain political and funding advantages. The resulting Uganda AIDS Commission (UAC) had been used for such purposes, and its statutes showed ignorance of HIV/AIDS, addressing only the symptoms without noting the causes, he claimed.

[http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2001/NGO437.doc.htm]

The UAC had been successful politically, and Uganda was known as a leader in the fight against the epidemic, yet there was neither an AIDS policy nor a fund to help those already infected in that country, according to Ruranga.

Testing remained a privilege of the affluent, and a positive diagnosis was a death sentence, he said. The AIDS commission did not include people living with AIDS - the people with the right kind of experience - in its activities, he added.

Ruranga said that any volunteers from the west could best assist volunteers in Africa by liaising with groups of people living with HIV/AIDS. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, through its country programme advisers, was the best method of identifying such groups, he said.

He suggested that there had been much misdirection of money allocated to AIDS interventions, and that the UN system, though not perfect in this regard, was at present the best hope for helping civil society monitor such funds.

Rurunga said African governments had been slow to curb the epidemic, because they had considered it an individual phenonemon. Those who contracted it were seen as "deserving it", he said, and government leaders had not anticipated the disease would affect the economy. In addition, outsiders had considered Africans to lack the infrastructure to deal with distributing medicine, he added.

Education was now changing the approach to HIV/AIDS in Africa, according to Ruranga. The epidemic was now seen as a social concern, not a personal one, he said.

However, more outside pressure on governments was needed to support the necessary changes, he added.
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