NEW YORK, July 12 (AFP) - Former US President Bill Clinton will embark on a week-long, six-nation African tour this weekend aimed at boosting the work of his foundation in combatting the scourge of AIDS in the continent.
Ira Magaziner, who heads up the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, said Tuesday that the visit to Mozambique, Lesotho, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda would seek to "reinvigorate political will" in those countries for scaling up AIDS treatment programmes.
Clinton will partly be following in the footsteps of US First Lady Laura Bush, who kicked off her own AIDS-related African tour -- taking in South Africa, Tanzania and Rwanda -- in Cape Town on Tuesday.
The Clinton Foundation's work in Africa has concentrated on helping governments design and implement AIDS treatment programmes, with a special focus on children, rural areas and widening access to affordable AIDS drugs.
"The really big challenge is the human resource challenge," Magaziner told reporters in a conference call.
"There is money available, but there needs to be a tremendous development in human resource capability," he said, citing an acute lack of medical staff, including nurses, in countries like Mozambique and Lesotho.
Mozambique, where as many as 1.8 million people are estimated to be HIV positive, will be Clinton's first stop. Magaziner said the foundation had managed to increase the number of people under treatment from just several hundred two years ago to around 12,000 now.
Clinton is expected to meet with political and religious leaders throughout his tour in an effort to break down remaining resistance to expanding AIDS initiatives.
"Most governments now realise that it is a very serious problem that needs to be addressed," Magaziner said.
"But the systems and human infrastructure are not in place to respond to a crisis like this. So any resistance is more about competency, organisation and human capacity, rather than political opposition," he added.
While in Tanzania, Clinton will visit the semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar where Muslims comprise 95 percent of the population and AIDS sufferers are often stigmatised.
AIDS will be a secondary issue during the South African leg, the main purpose of which is former president Nelson Mandela's birthday, with Clinton scheduled to give a speech at the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
In Kenya, Clinton will meet with President Mwai Kibaki and launch a major pediatric initiative to counter the prevalence of HIV infections among children.
His final stop will be Rwanda, where the number of known infections spiked in 2003, particularly among women -- a result, experts believe, of the multiple rapes that accompanied the 1994 genocide.
While AIDS was already a problem in Rwanda, "the genocide made it a lot worse," Magaziner said.
According to the United Nations AIDS programme, sub-Saharan Africa is home to more than 60 percent of people around the world living with HIV. In 2004, an estimated 3.1 million people in the region became newly infected.
In the countries where it has direct involvement, the Clinton Foundation aims to get 300,000 people on treatment by the end of this year, with the goal of raising that figure to between one and two million by 2008.
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