•  busan
• Friday, December 02, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Billions of people are marking yet another World AIDS Day - this one themed 'Getting to Zero', for zero AIDS-related deaths, zero new infections, and zero stigma and discrimination.

But in Africa, what may be needed is zero tolerance for corruption so that funds required to fight HIV/AIDS and create awareness around the virus do not get siphoned away.

'In East Africa alone, Uganda has had its main source of HIV funding suspended. Kenya has, on several occasions, come close to a similar fate due to evidence of massive misappropriation of HIV funding,' says John Peter Kaguruzi, a public policy analyst in Rwanda.

'In Djibouti, of the 5.3 million dollars given as an anti- HIV grant, 750,000 dollars were spent on expenditure that cannot be explained. Similar stories are rife in Zambia and Mali. More audits would most likely reveal misuse of such funds which has denied many people access to preventive as well as curative initiatives,' Kaguruzi says.

Creating awareness has been important in places like Kenya where those afflicted were stigmatised and seen as promiscuous. When they died, they were buried in a polythene bag. Over the years, Kenyans have become more aware of HIV/AIDS but that has not reduced the stigma attached to the disease. Neither has it significantly curbed risky sexual behaviour. Some 1.4 million Kenyans are currently living with HIV.

Statistics by UNAIDS , the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS prevention and cure, show that an estimated 22.5 million people were living with HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa. Slightly over half of them are women. Children have not been spared ; they account for 2.3 million of this figure.

Years of research do not appear to have brought scientists any closer to discovering a cure for HIV/AIDS, and the condition claims at least one million lives every year in Sub-Saharan Africa alone.

But if millions of people in Africa infected with HIV are still alive, it is because of donor funding that makes it possible for them to access life-sustaining drugs. 'There’s need for more funding to provide treatment,' Mary Naliaka, a nurse in Kenya, told IPS. But more funding is perhaps not what African countries need.

'Of the 145 countries that receive aid to fight HIV, an audit into 25 of these countries shows that they received a total of 4.8 billion dollars, but these grantees cannot account for 39 million dollars. In Mauritania alone, 67 percent of aid to fight HIV was misused,' Kaguruzi explains.

But he is quick to caution that the lost money is not a comprehensive figure. 'This is only an indication that massive corruption exists. In some countries the audit did not assess the entire grant, only a part of it. In Djibouti for instance, only 80 percent of the fund was audited, revealing a 30 percent misappropriation.' Programmes that popularise prevention of HIV/AIDS by creating more awareness of the condition, HIV programmes in health facilities and the provision of free condoms are all affected by missing funds.

Ann Kariuki, a counsellor at an HIV/AIDS voluntary testing centre in Kenya, told IPS: 'Often, condoms dispensers are empty. Not so long ago we would plead with people to use the free condoms provided by the government through the Ministry of Health. Now there are rarely enough free condoms.'

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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