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UNDP, in cooperation with Botswana's National AIDS Coordinating Agency (NACA), has held a series of leadership development workshops to strengthen the response to HIV/AIDS in one of the world's hardest hit countries. About 130 leaders from many sectors attended the three-day sessions. They came from government departments, including the police, health and social service agencies, the private sector and civil society organisations.

The Municipal Services Project is seeking proposals for research on the impact of the marketization of key basic services (specifically water and electricity) on the ability of households with HIV/AIDS to cope with the illness. This research is intended to act as a pilot study for a larger investigation of this issue and is exploratory in nature. Up to US$10,000 is available for this phase of the work. The marketization of services (e.g. privatization, cost recovery) is most advanced in South Africa, but similar developments are occurring throughout the region. We will consider proposals from any Southern African country where the marketization and health link can be adequately investigated. Proposals must be submitted by May 15, 2004.

A few months ago nine-month-old Aurelio Clemente, battling with malaria and meningitis, would have been yet another child mortality statistic in Angola, where one in four children die before their fifth birthday. But since the opening of a specialised malaria centre earlier this year in Kuito, capital of the central province of Bie, Aurelio's chances of survival have improved considerably.

The South African government expressed concern this week after a news report highlighted the story of a young woman who admitted she was thinking of contracting the HI virus to access a disability grant. The young woman, Thato, said she had ten 'boyfriends' with whom she slept for money. She was supporting two nieces, her own child and a grandmother suffering from diabetes on the money she made, by being what she described as a "prostitute in disguise".

The Kenyan government has announced a new anti-malaria policy which encourages the use of more effective combination drugs for treatment, alongside the promotion of insecticide-treated nets to prevent exposure to mosquitoes that carry the disease. Health Minister Charity Ngilu said in a statement to mark the annual Africa Malaria Day on Sunday that her government was trying to find US $20 million a year to implement the new policy.

The problems that affect agriculture in Cameroon are dispiritingly familiar: underinvestment in rural areas, limited access to water - and a global trading environment that disadvantages small-scale farmers. Government says it is trying to tackle the situation. But, civil society groups don't necessarily view its efforts with optimism. Although 50 percent of the population depends on agriculture for its livelihood, ”it only receives eight percent of total state investment monies,” says Alain Kounga, president of the Association of Development Promoters.

African Ministers of Finance convened in Washington DC for the annual International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Spring Meetings to review the two institutions' operations. Given that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is the greatest threat facing the African continent today, the members of the Pan-African Treatment Movement (PATAM) called on all African Finance Ministers to consider HIV/AIDS as an issue affecting all other critical developmental issues. PATAM is an Africa-wide movement advocating for access to HIV/AIDS treatment and other essential medicines. Through an open letter to their respective Ministers of Finance, PATAM members urged African governments to support initiatives that will contain and reverse the steady march of the epidemic. PATAM emphasised the importance of governments enhancing the current efforts by the World Bank and IMF against HIV/AIDS but rejecting those initiatives that hamper access to life-saving and affordable medicines for people living with HIV/AIDS.

Sixty-three people, 48 of them children, died from hunger last month in Zimbabwe's second city of Bulawayo, a health official was quoted as saying in a newspaper report on Friday. A top health official in the city, Zanele Hwalima, told the Zimbabwe Independent that "poverty, food shortages and inability to access nutrients" contributed to the deaths. Health officials in Bulawayo were not immediately available to confirm the figures.

A $6.3 million community care campaign for families affected by HIV/AIDS has been launched in Ethiopia. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the government's HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Office (HAPCO) have collaborated on a project to support HIV/AIDS affected households, women and children. According to recent studies in Ethiopia, almost two-thirds of deaths in the capital among people aged between 20 and 54 are AIDS-related.

"Swaziland now holds the dubious title of [having] the highest [HIV] prevalence level in the world. ... [It] is a vivid microcosm of all the similarly afflicted countries of Southern Africa. At the grass roots, where it counts, there's a superhuman determination to bring the pandemic to heel, and to overcome the tremendous assault on the human condition." This is according to Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. Lewis highlights innovative national Swazi plans, supported by the World Health Organisation, for stepping up response to the pandemic. But Swaziland is also representative of other countries in that in practice implementation is still painfully slow. And other obstacles, ranging from U.S. congressional delays on trade legislation to Swaziland's own unresolved issues of democracy and women's rights, may still overwhelm the positive momentum of national efforts, according to a briefing on HIV/AIDS in Swaziland by the Africa Focus Bulletin.

Less than 10% of HIV-positive individuals in South Africa will be eligible to receive antiretroviral therapy if World Health Organisation guidelines which mandate the use of anti-HIV therapy in patients with a CD4 cell count below 200 cells/mm3 are followed, according to a French-funded study published in the May 1st edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes. The study also found that this would have only a limited impact on the spread of HIV.

This article considers the pivotal role that Zimbabwe’s diaspora could play in a post-Mugabe environment but points to the lack of action around such a forward-looking agenda or resources to support various aspects of Zimbabwe’s recovery.

Malaria kills approximately two million people a year, some 90 percent of them in Africa. These numbers come close to the estimated three million worldwide dying of AIDS. The two diseases differ in many ways, but there are deadly similarities. In both cases, action falls far behind promises, while debates about strategy are used as excuses for failure to provide resources. In the case of malaria, at stake are both availability of resources and willingness to adopt new, more effective drugs to replace ones that are now ineffective. Both concerns raise issues of political will, says a recent edition of the Africa Focus Bulletin.

Desperate HIV-positive Africans are increasingly turning to the black market for AIDS medicines and healing remedies, often endangering their lives by taking toxic or ineffective drugs, according to a report by Germany's Der Spiegel magazine. The black market often offers more drugs than most pharmacies, from cocktails such as Triomune 40 or Combivir to antiretrovirals such as Videx, Okamune or Zerit. Even though the packets are not always labelled and vendors cannot offer information about dosage, many patients find that buying drugs on the black market provides a hassle-free alternative with no prescriptions needed, no waiting time and no registration.

HIV/AIDS and poverty have led to increased numbers of orphans, abandoned children and youngsters living on the streets of Kenya, according to the co-author of a report presented at a workshop in Nairobi in March 2004 organised by the Commonwealth Service Abroad Programme (CSAP) and the Department of Children's Services in Kenya's Ministry of Home Affairs. "More than a million children in Kenya below the age of 15 have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS," said Cecilia Manyame, a CSAP volunteer expert and co-author of the report, who visited the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, UK, last week.

Political parties in the new Parliament should form an all-party group on HIV/Aids, the Treatment Action Campaign said. In a post-election electronic newsletter, the organisation said it had refused to go along with parties that wanted to make HIV/Aids a party political issue. However it welcomed the major opposition parties' common view that a comprehensive strategy was required for HIV/Aids.

Former rebel group UNITA has called on Angolan authorities to speed up integration of its health workers into government services, noting an acute lack of medical professionals in the country's ailing health sector. UNITA secretary for health and environment Carlos Morgado told IRIN on Wednesday that despite an improvement in the number of ex-UNITA health "technicians" enrolled at public hospitals last year, there were thousands of trained health workers without employment.

African Union HIV/Aids committee chairman Kenneth Kaunda has lambasted "some African countries" for lacking the political will to tackle the disease. However, the former Zambian president did not include SA on the list of errant nations. Kaunda stressed that the cost of providing AIDS drugs was prohibitive for many African countries, and urged the international community to "take appropriate measures" to help Africa to lessen the effects of the virus.

More than one billion people worldwide are not getting essential health care, according to a report by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), which calls for international donors to focus more on closing the growing health gap between the world's wealthy nations and its poorest. The 32-page report, 'Improving the Health of the World's Poorest People', finds that per capita health spending in the world's least developed countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, comes to only about 11 U.S. dollars a year.