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3 May, 2008May 2008
G8 Campaign in Full Swing
AIDS G8 Japanese Embassy Campaign Continues to 30 May
The Global Union AIDS Programme (GUAP) has extended its campaign to contact Japanese Embassies until 30 May 2008. The approach to Japanese Embassies is to urge the Japanese Government, as the current G8 President, to ensure that the next G8 Summit takes action to strengthen health care systems and to create an accountability mechanism on the G8 Nations’ promises regarding HIV/AIDS. Model letters to be delivered to the Japanese embassy in your country can be found here in English, Français or Español.
Three years ago, the Global Unions HIV/AIDS Programme launched its campaign to convince Heads of State, who were attending the G8 Summit, to create a high-level Working Group on HIV/AIDS, with the technical support of existing bodies such as UNAIDS and its co-sponsors.
Thanks to the tremendous efforts by so many trade unions, last year the German Presidency issued a first report on meeting G8 targets for HIV/AIDS. We believe this paves the way for the production of annual reviews and for establishing a mechanism that, at long last, will provide recommendations for action to subsequent G8 summits.
However, we are convinced that combining our request, in connection with the need for health system strengthening and overall trade union issues for public and occupational health, will make our case much stronger.
We want to build upon our successes of previous years, and we are asking you to organise some activity around the delivery of a letter to the Japanese Embassy in your country, and to insist that your government also request support for this G8 HIV/AIDS mechanism.
For your information, the G8 is composed of governments from the following countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russian Federation, United Kingdom, and the United States. The G8 Summit will take place from 7-9 July 2008, and will be hosted by the Japanese Government in Toyako, Hokkaido.
ICEM Assessment Missions and Sub-Regional Workshops
More than three years into the HIV/AIDS project, the ICEM will conduct sub-regional workshops and assessment missions in three African sub-regions: English-speaking West Africa (Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone), French-speaking West Africa (Côte d’Ivoire, DR Congo, Mali) and southern Africa (Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia).
The first sub-regional workshop, with participants from Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, will be organised in Lagos from 21 to 23 July. Prior to the workshop, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria will be visited to assess the impact of the HIV/AIDS programmes in these countries.
Assessment missions for southern and East Africa will visit Zambia, Uganda, Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania, and South Africa in August and September. The sub-regional workshop will take place in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, from 14-16 October.
A workshop for the French-speaking sub-region will be organised in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in the fourth quarter of this year, together with an assessment mission to Mali, DR Congo, and to Côte d’Ivoire.
The HIV/AIDS resolution of the ICEM’s 4th World Congress called on the ICEM to continue to fully prioritise HIV/AIDS. Assessment of the current project will also identify national priorities and objectives for an extension of the present project.
ILO Recommendation on HIV/AIDS and the World of Work
In March 2007, the Governing Body of the ILO decided to place on the agenda of the International Labour Conferences for 2009 and 2010 an item intended for “the development of an autonomous Recommendation on HIV and AIDS in the world of work.”
The ILO has begun work towards the adoption of a Recommendation in 2010. Under the Constitution and Standing Orders, five reports have to be prepared within specific time limits and each report to contain specific information. The first report, called a “Law and Practice Report,” provides an overview of national and international measures taken with respect to HIV/AIDS. This report was published and sent to governments in January 2008.
The Law and Practice Report, which is available at www.ilo.org/aids, also contains a questionnaire to which governments, in consultation with employers’ and workers’ organisations, are to provide replies to the ILO by the end of July 2008. Consultation usually occurs through national trade union centres.
The ICEM calls on its affiliates to get fully involved in this process and make sure that substantive replies, with comments which reflect the views of workers, are provided in time. It is only in this way that the second report, which will be prepared by the ILO on the basis of the replies received, reflect the views of workers and their unions. It is worth noting that workers’ organisations may also provide their comments directly to the ILO.
AIDS in Brazil
Over the past 20 years, the Brazilian government has had an impressive achievement in keeping the HIV/AIDS epidemic under control.
The energetic response has taken three forms:
First, there has always been an insistence on the need to wear condoms, particularly in carnival time when the usual supply of free condoms increases by 40%. The World Bank recently helped the government buy a billion condoms – around a tenth of the world’s total annual supply.
Second, the government funds free treatment for anyone with AIDS. This has involved side-stepping patents on anti-retroviral drugs to keep costs down.
Third, NGOs have been good at publicising the cause and at holding federal and local governments to their promises.
Recently, the disease has spread, however. Although the total number of people affected is still low at 620,000 (in a total population of 190 million), which represents 0.6% of those aged 15 to 49, the change in the profile of sufferers makes the fight harder.
HIV/AIDS has gone from being an almost exclusively male disease to one that does not discriminate by sex. The responsibility in this lies in drug users sharing used needles and bi-sexual men. As a result, women now account for 40% of all new cases. Among teenagers, more girls have the disease than boys.
(Source: The Economist, 15 March)
World Bank Rewards Safe Sex
Thousands of people will be paid to avoid unsafe sex under a groundbreaking experiment backed by the World Bank that is aimed at halting the spread of HIV infections.
The trial will counsel 3,000 men and women in southern rural Tanzania over three years, paying them on condition that periodic laboratory test results prove that they have not contracted sexually transmitted infections. The proposed payments of US$45 equates to a quarter of the annual income of some participants. The programme also guarantees free treatment for any participants found to be infected.
The programme marks an important step in the fight against AIDS. In spite of billions of dollars spent annually on treatment and prevention worldwide, there were about 2.5 million new HIV infections in 2007, the majority of them in Africa.
Conditional cash transfers have been used in other programmes elsewhere, such as motivating school attendance, vaccination, and visits to health clinics. The designers of the Tanzanian programme believe that payment of US$45, when combined with careful counselling, could play an important role in reducing HIV infections, especially among young women.
(Source: Financial Times, 26-27 April)
Global Fund Agrees on Early Launch of Round 9
In an unexpected development, the Board of the Global Fund, meeting in Geneva on 28-29 April, agreed in principle that Round 9 will be launched nearly six months earlier than had been anticipated. The Board also agreed that CCMs, whose Round 8 proposals narrowly fail to be approved, will be permitted to resubmit those proposals as part of Round 9, after they address shortcomings pointed out by the Technical Review Panel (TRP). Prior to this board meeting, it had been assumed that the Round 9 Call for Proposals would be made in March 2009.
In Rounds 8 and 9, as in the past, the TRP will divide proposals into four categories, as follows:
• Category 1 and 2: TRP recommends Board to approve the proposal
• Category 3: Not worthy of approval as it stands; but worth improving and resubmitting.
• Category 4: TRP recommends Board to reject the proposal.
However, the Board's decision includes some important changes from past procedures, which affect not only Round 9 applicants, but also Round 8 applicants (for which the deadline for submission is 1 July 2008). When the TRP writes its comments in September on Round 8 proposals that it assigns to Category 3, it will not just list strengths and weaknesses, it will, in the words of the Board decision, "recommend the types of changes that need to be made to strengthen the proposal for resubmission."
(Source: Global Fund Observer Issue 89, 30 April 2008. GFO is a free service of Aidspan www.aidspan.org. To receive GFO, send an email to [email protected])
New South African Musical Centred on Mining Life
A new South African musical, Shosholoza, revolves around life in the gold-mining community. The setting is a fictitious mine called The Highveld Gold Fields Mines, in Johannesburg, and the production touches on issues such as the plight of mineworkers, HIV and Aids, and mine safety.
Shosholoza centres on the highs and lows of a newly recruited mineworker, Jabulani Makhathini, who is from a rural village in KwaZulu-Natal. Jabulani becomes a heavyweight stick-fighting champion during his times as a mineworker and he falls in love with a woman, named Mavi, who also works at the mine.
(Source: The Mercury, South Africa, 15 April)
News from ILOAIDS
The second report on the International HIV/AIDS Workplace Education Programme, SHARE (Strategic HIV/AIDS Responses in Enterprises), entitled “Saving Lives, Protecting Jobs” was launched in April. The report explains the tripartite approach, under the chapters:
• Building a multi-sectoral response: working with ministries of labour
• Mobilising the private sector: employers and their organisations
• Using powerful networks: workers and their organisations.
It describes lessons learned from the SHARE pioneer countries such as India, Benin, Cambodia, and Ghana, and sets out plans for sustainability.
In an interview on 14 April, Dr Sophia Kisting, ILOAIDS Director, stressed the importance of the workplace as a key delivery point for HIV prevention, treatment, and care programmes. She pointed out that in the five years since its inception, the SHARE programme is now collaborating with 650 enterprises, reaching an estimated one million workers in 24 countries.
Kisting emphasised that behaviour change programmes are an essential and central element in enterprise-level initiatives within SHARE. Many workers do not know enough about HIV to protect themselves, while others do know but still do not change their behaviour to reduce the risk of infection.
She also referred to the Recommendation on HIV and AIDS in the World of Work, which is to be discussed at the 2009 International Labour Conference and which will provide a framework for national policy development and action.
(Source: ILOAIDS website where the report can be downloaded)
News from the Global Union Programme and Global Unions
In its most recent HIV/AIDS Updates (Nos. 39, 40, and 41 of 15 March, and 1 and 15 April) the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) (www.itfglobal.org) reports, among other items, on the preparations of the UN high level meeting on HIV/AIDS to be held on 10-11 June. A Civil Society Task Force, of which the ITF Global HIV/AIDS Project Coordinator, Dr Syed Asif Altaf, is a member, has been set up to support effective participation and contributions from civil society and the private sector, including unions.
According to a recently released resource book of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), large transportation and infrastructure projects financed by the ADB could fuel the spread of HIV in some parts of the region. Such projects employ workers in remote areas where they are separated from their families. Commercial sex workers and drug and human trafficking follow workers.
The April newsletter of PSUFASA www.psufasa.org, the southern Africa public sector unions’ project on HIV and AIDS, reports on the extension of the project to 2011. The union UNISON of the UK has received substantial project funding from the Department for International Development, DFID.