Bonos message: the battle has only just begun; World Aids Day;
LONDON, 1st December: In a world of calibrated cynicism here is something unabashedly positive to celebrate today to mark what is the 20th occasion that people across the globe have commemorated – if that is the right word – World Aids Day.
The words come from the man who is now as honoured as a campaigner against extreme poverty as he is as front man for the worlds biggest-selling rock band.
“Three years ago,” says Bono, the lead singer of U2, “there was virtually no one in Africa on antiretroviral drugs. Now you will have two million by the end of this year.”
Two million is, of course, only a fraction of those affected by the disease which has to date killed more than 25 million people – making it one of the most destructive epidemics in human history.
Another estimated 40 million people are now living with HIV. But the international community is, for the first time, showing real signs of progress in combating the disease on a significant scale.
That fact is, in no small measure, down to the campaigning of the impassioned Irish vocalist, who has lobbied governments for action and corralled some of the world’s biggest businesses into playing their part – which is why this newspaper, for the fourth time, turns itself (Red) today.
Since it was founded 20 months ago, (Red) has donated an extraordinary 50 million US dollar to the Global Fund to fights Aids, TB and Malaria. – Do the maths. It costs about 5 dollar (25 DKR) a week to pay for the two pills a day it takes to keep someone with HIV alive, Bono notes.
Aids is no longer a death sentence. Antiretroviral medication will bring someone who is at deaths door back to virtually full health. Doctors call itthe Lazarus effect.
More than 20 per cent of all funding to fight Aids now comes from the Global Fund. An extra 50 million in its coffers means that a million people who would previously have died have are being kept alive, day in day out, seven days a week, 52 weeks of the year.
That is in addition to the extra anti-Aids drugs being provided by governments under the Gleneagles promises. It is nearly double the numbers treated by the Global Fund the year before.
Campaigning for Africa has claimed a significant part of Bonos time over the past 12 months. He has travelled extensively to check on whether the promises of increased aid and debt cancellation made at Gleneagles after Live8 have been made good.
– The most important thing to tell people is that, according to figures to be announced by the World Bank and OECD next week, an extra 26 million African children are going to school now because of debt cancellation, Bono explains.
In Tanzania he saw the impact of that in the classroom. – Two years ago an extra 1,5 million went to school. Last year that figure went up to three million. Where there were seven children to a desk now there is four. Instead of one book per desk there’s now three, says he.
Bono: – In Ghana there is a ghetto just outside Accra called Nima. Some 70.000 people lived there without any sanitation whatsoever when I visited five years ago. I was back there last year and peeing in this public bathroom and looked up and saw a sign saying paid for by HIPC – that is the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative. That is debt relief.
What has been preoccupying him is building a movement to do in the United States what Make Poverty History did in the UK: – The British people and government have been global leaders in the fight against poverty, and the recent spending review confirms that. So people here forget that things are nowhere near so advanced in other places, Bono stresses.
The lobbying organisation he and Bob Geldof founded, DATA, ran a massive campaign to lift global poverty up the domestic agenda in Germany before the last G8 there, with a level of success which surprised many commentators.
They are doing the same in Japan ahead of the next G8. But the market to crack is the United States.
– We need a Make Poverty History in the US and we are working on one. It is called The One Campaign and we have 2,5 million Americans signed up, but we need far more, notes Bono.
Kilde: The Push Journal
