South Africa: Civil society network to help ARV rollout

About 90 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province have teamed up to work with the government in rolling out antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, in the first structured civil society response of its kind in South Africa, and possibly even on the continent. When the government announced a national rollout plan for free ARVs in September 2003, Cati Vawda, director of the Durban-based Children's Rights Centre, and a number of her NGO colleagues, quickly realised that "government alone cannot do it".