Service Delivery with Advocacy

ACORD has called on AIDS service organisations on the continent to blend service delivery with advocacy to assure sustainability of their AIDS interventions in Africa.

Speaking in a workshop to over 100 representatives from AIDS service organisations drawn from Southern Africa who also are partners of the Swedish and Norwegian bilateral aid agencies in Lusaka, Zambian on 7th November, Mr. Nanjakululu Wasai, the ACORD Policy and Advocacy Officer decried the tendency of many AIDS organisations to concentrate on service delivery alone.

Mr. Nanjakululu said that ACORD had learned form her experience that practical activities though good were not enough to alleviate suffering and marginalisation of the millions of Africans infected or affected by AIDS. Noting that service delivery was the remit of governments and NGOs were purely playing a complementary role, he called on them to balance that with advocacy aimed at empowering people living with HIV (PLHIV), the poor and marginalised to understand, challenge and change circumstances that make them poor by targeting policy changes that would give them a voice in decision making at national level.

Mr. Nanjakululu suggested that it is time AIDS service organisations and PLHIV organizations alike to understand how other sectors impact on the success or failure of AIDS interventions in Africa. Giving the example of constraints in AIDS funding among majority of African governments even in the face of the Abuja Declaration of 2001 that committed African states to allocate 15% of their annual national budgets to health, Nanjakululu called on the civil society to put pressure on their governments to honour their own agreements to rein in AIDS in Africa.

The Octopus Approach to AIDS by the International Community

Turning to debts, he wondered aloud how in the first place a continent with the biggest AIDS burden per capita (Africa has only 10% of the world’s population yet accounts for about 70% of those living with HIV and AIDS) would also have the worst debt burden that drains resources away from the continent. For that reason, he argued, debt servicing denied Africa the much needed resources to invest in AIDS interventions and poverty alleviation. Alluding to the tendency of international multilateral financing institutions and donor governments to act and speak at cross purposes, he cited the Zambian case where even after benefiting from debt relief, the country could not invest the saved resources into health and other social sectors owing to public expenditure ceilings imposed by IMF. These tactics he said amount to the octopus approach where arms of similar international agencies had policies and practices that went completely contrary to the stated goal of winning the war on AIDS as enshrined in the millennium development goals. He also gave the example of international trade where Africa is often short-changed at the world market, receiving peanuts for her goods only to go begging for aid to invest in AIDS interventions. He underscored the need for mainstreaming AIDS in trade agreements through fair trade deals that give value for African goods to enable Africa pay her own bills instead of paying lip service to African problems through unsustainable handouts when a solution that is sustainable is available to international actors. ‘If the international community truly thinks that AIDS is a catastrophe in Africa and empathizes with the situation, let them invest their efforts where it would make the greatest impact and that is fair trade and equitable rules of trade at WTO that would ensure resources flow to Africa instead of out of Africa’ he concluded.

Speaking at the same function, the Programme Officer for SIDA-Civil Society Centre, Mr. Alexander Muigai called on AIDS service organisations in Africa to engage themselves with the Paris Agenda adding that donors expected CSOs to also find a formula to act in a coordinated manner to ensure there was no duplicity in their efforts. He said the next consultative meeting on the Paris Agenda will take place in September 2008 in Accra, Ghana and CSOs needed to develop a common stand to make their voices heard at that forum.

The workshop dubbed ‘ACT as ONE’ had been organised by the Swedish and Norwegian Aid agency Team based in Lusaka Zambia with the goal of bringing together their partners in Africa to work as a team in confronting challenges in the fight against AIDS on the continent.

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