Africa struggles to spend AIDS billions

[Guest guest]

Africa struggles to spend AIDS billions

Welamasonga Tanzania | February 27, 2006 11:46:23 AM IST

With billions of dollars pouring in to fight Africa's HIV/AIDS

epidemic, Tanzanian AIDS counsellor Gandencia Bazil has a simple request.

''We need a bicycle,'' said Bazil, who heads the AIDS committee in

this village near Lake , an area where an estimated 12 per

cent of people are infected with HIV.

''With a bicycle we could reach more people with health messages.

But we cannot afford even that,'' said Bazil, as other members of her

committee nodded grimly following a meeting in a makeshift shelter

near the village centre.

''We are not getting the support we need.'' Welamasonga's predicament

is repeated across Africa, where despite a huge jump in overseas

assistance and government AIDS budgets, the cash earmarked to fight

the epidemic is often not making it to the desperate people who need

it most.

In Mozambique, officials say only a fraction of some 70,000 children

eligible for AIDS drug treatment will get it this year because of a

shortage of trained doctors and nurses.

In badly-hit South Africa, health departments report being unable to

spend their AIDS budgets, while in Nigeria inefficient bureaucracy has

been blamed for missed treatment targets and questionable data.

Aid agency officials agree that the surge in AIDS spending has created

bottlenecks, with fragile healthcare systems, disorganised government

departments and fledgling community groups often ill-prepared to

absorb the money flowing in.

The scale of the AIDS crisis in Africa where some 26 million people

are infected with HIV, more than 2 million died of AIDS in 2005 and

well over 12 million children have lost one or both parents to the

disease -- still dwarfs the assistance being made available.

Nevertheless,both governments and United Nations' agencies, which

spent years fighting to raise AIDS funding, are now battling to

develop new strategies to spend it.

''We all need to begin thinking out of the box,'' Piot,

executive director of the United Nations' AIDS agency UNAIDS, said

during a recent inspection trip to Tanzania where he was often asked

why cash was not reaching grassroots groups.

''Stopping the AIDS epidemic is going to require more than just a

medical approach.'' HALTING PROGRESS Worldwide AIDS funding has jumped

from 250 million dollars in 1995 to more than 8 billion dollars in

2005. UNAIDS says that will have to rise to $22 billion by 2008 if the

HIV/AIDS disaster is to be contained.

--- End forwarded message ---