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12 April, 2010
In this issue of the ICEM HIV/AIDS newsletter, we inform about the union action for universal access in the run-up to the G8/G20 summits in Canada and give an overview of the activities planned in sub-Saharan Africa in 2010.
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G8/G20: Union Action for Universal Access to HIV/AIDS Services
Trade unions in Africa and all over the world have joined forces to lobby the G8 and G20 for the provision of universal access to HIV and AIDS prevention, treatment, care and support. The lobbying is spearheaded by the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the Africa Regional Organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
National trade union centres in Africa and elsewhere have delivered messages to the Canadian embassies in their country calling on Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to play a leading role in convincing his fellow leaders to take quick and decisive action on HIV and AIDS. As the host country, Canada will preside over the G8 Summit in June and will co-host with South Korea the G20 Summit.
The Global Union AIDS Programme has called on its membership to participate in this global campaign. The ICEM has delivered a letter to the Canadian mission in Geneva strongly urging that the G8 put forward an action plan to achieve its promises regarding universal access and calling on the Summits to support the ILO Decent Work Agenda and its Global Jobs Pact.
It may be recalled that 2010 is the target year for the G8 commitment to achieve universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support made at the 2005 Summit in Gleneagles. The failure to achieve this is evident; not even half of the ten million people who need treatment are actually on it.
ICEM HIV/AIDS Project in Sub-Saharan Africa
Planning was completed last month for the HIV/AIDS project in Sub-Saharan Africa with the sponsorship of SASK Finland and FNV Mondiaal of the Netherlands.
Activities in 2010 will include two sub-regional workshops to strengthen the workplace response to HIV and AIDS in Anglophone and Francophone West Africa and in Southern Africa in September and October. A further workshop in May will be exclusively for women from the Southern African sub-region.
At the national level, countries have submitted programmes which put emphasis on campaigns for voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) and include further training of peer educators and counselors. In Guinea (Conakry) and Côte d’Ivoire, training will be completed in new target companies and HIV/AIDS workplace policies are expected to be concluded. VCT campaigns will be initiated in Guinea and continue in Côte d’Ivoire.
Ghana has drawn lessons from the regional workshop in November 2009 and included a VCT campaign and a workshop on collective bargaining in its programme. As a new project country, Mauritius will concentrate its efforts on widespread awareness campaigns at the workplace and address the issue of migrant workers and local and foreign sex workers.
The well-established programme in Nigeria will expand its scope to training women as peer educators. Sierra Leone will draw on trained workers and its collaboration with the National AIDS Secretariat to run VCT campaigns in mining areas.
A well-designed programme in Zambia will deal with peer education, VCT campaigns and collective bargaining issues. Uganda will undertake, among others, a revision of existing collective bargaining agreements to include HIV/AIDS clauses. In Tanzania, workshops will prepare a VCT campaign sponsored by the Women’s Department of the German IGBCE.
AIDS a Key Cause of Female Death
HIV and AIDS have become the leading causes of disease and death among women of reproductive age worldwide, UNAIDS said at the launch of a five-year action plan addressing the gender issues which put women at risk.
Nearly 30 years from the beginning of the epidemic, HIV services still do not respond to the specific needs of women and girls. Up to 70% of women worldwide encounter violence. Experiencing violence hampers their ability to negotiate safe sex.
UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé pointed out that “by robbing women of their dignity we are losing the opportunity to tap half the potential of mankind to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Women and girls are not victims; they are the driving force that brings about social transformation.”
Of the 33.4 million people living with HIV worldwide, 15.7 million – or almost half – are women. The proportion of women infected with HIV has risen in many regions; in Sub-Saharan Africa, it has reached 60%. In Southern Africa, HIV prevalence among young women aged 15 to 24 years is almost three times higher than among men of the same age group.
(Source: UNAIDS website and BBC News, 3 March)
South Africa: Launches Massive HIV Testing Campaign
From 15 April, everyone attending a clinic or hospital in South Africa will be offered an HIV test, regardless of whether they have symptoms of the disease or not. Patients have the option to refuse the test.
Dubbed the HIV Counselling and Testing Campaign, or HCT, this is the most ambitious HIV testing campaign in the world, according to the SA National AIDS Council (SANAC). The target is to have 15 million South Africans tested for HIV by June 2011.
The campaign has four objectives: to increase health-seeking behaviour; to encourage people to know their status; to equip those who test HIV-negative with ways to ensuring that they do not get infected; and to create an entry point to accessing wellness and treatment services for those who test HIV-positive.
(Source: www.health-e.org.za, 18 March)
Malawi: Ambitious Plan to Prolong Life
Malawi’s government announced plans to more than double the number of people receiving antiretroviral (ARV) drugs to half a million by the end of 2010.
The country recently adopted new World Health Organisation guidelines that raise the threshold for starting ARV therapy from a CD4 count (a measure of the immune system strength) of less than 200 to a CD4 count of 350, regardless of whether the patient is displaying symptoms.
Although implementing the changes will be expensive, some experts argue that starting patients on ARVs earlier could actually save money in the long term by reducing the need to treat them for opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis.
Malawi successfully utilised its Global Fund Round 1 grant and was awarded a grant under the rolling continuation channel, which extends funding for six years and which can be used for the expansion of treatment.
(Source: IRIN plusnews, 19 March)
Global Funds Seeks $17-20 Billion from Donors for 2011-2013
Mother-to-child HIV transmission may be eliminated by 2015; malaria may be eliminated as a public health problem within a decade; TB prevalence could be halved by 2015. However, these health targets can only be achieved if current rates of scaling up expenditure on the three diseases are maintained and, ideally, further accelerated. And that, in turn, requires donors to give the Global Fund between $17 billion and $20 billion during 2011-2013.
This is what the Global Fund announced in a news release and in several documents released in preparation for upcoming "replenishment" meetings with donors. The Global Fund says that demand for donor support has more than doubled since the last replenishment in 2007 (which raised $10 billion for the period 2008-2010).
An initial replenishment meeting was held on 24-25 March at The Hague, Netherlands. This meeting provided an opportunity for donors to discuss the Fund's financial needs for 2011-2013 and the results achieved by the Global Fund to date. The meeting laid the foundation for the pledging conference that will take place at the UN Headquarters in New York on 4-5 October 2010.
(Source: Global Fund Observer, Issue 117 of 18 March. GFO is a free service of Aidspan, www.aidspan.org; to receive GFO send an email to
[email protected])
News from Global Union AIDS Programme
At the meeting of the Steering Committee of the Global Union AIDS Programme (GUAP) in Brussels on 17 March, Jan Eastman was appointed Chair of the Programme. Jan is the Deputy General Secretary of Education International (EI), a Global Union Federation. She took over from Alan Leather who had been the Chair since the inception of the Programme.
The Steering Committee reviewed its activities, received reports from Global Unions, and charted its input for major campaigns and events in 2010, such as ILO’s International Labour Conference in June, with the second discussion of a new instrument on HIV/AIDS and the world of work, and the International AIDS Conference in Vienna in July.
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