UNAIDS: The First 10 Years

UNAIDS The First 10 Years130In June 2001, a small group of people led by Cleves from the UNAIDS Secretariat and AndrewCassels, now Director of Health Policy, Development and Services at WHO, had organizedthe meeting at the President Wilson Hotel overlooking Lake Geneva. Representatives frommore than 50 countries from the developed and developing world, multilateral organizationsand nongovernmental organizations, private foundations and other stakeholders attendedthe meeting. It was agreed that ‘the Fund should take an integrated approach to fightingHIV/AIDS, TB [tuberculosis] and malaria and build on existing efforts to strengthen localcapacity and health systems’ 32 . But there were strong tensions between some of the donorcountries and the multilateral organizations, which were suspected of wanting to run thefund on their own. The UN was not deemed capable of doing anything in a businesslikeway by certain donor representatives. These tensions would at times dominate the planningmeetings for the Fund.Establishing the Pan Caribbean Partnership againstHIV/AIDS“… it’s too easyto dismiss theseconferences as‘Oh, well, justdiplomatic society,what comes outof it?’ Well, whatcomes out of itis much neededclarity on what …needs to be done.It is the commonsong-sheet ofthe internationalcommunity”.Across the Atlantic, the Pan Caribbean Partnership against HIV/AIDS (PANCAP) was establishedin February 2001. The Partnership was launched in a region that had the secondhighest prevalence of HIV after Africa (an estimated 390 000 adults and children living withHIV at the end of 2000). The Caribbean Partnership Commitment had six original signatories:Owen Arthur, Prime Minister of Barbados and Chair of CARICOM; Denzil Douglas,Prime Minister of Saint Kitts and Nevis; Edwin Carrington, Secretary-General of CARICOM;Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS; Sir George Alleyne, Director of Pan AmericanHealth Organization/WHO, and Yolanda Simon, Founder and Regional Coordinator of theCaribbean Regional Network of People living with HIV/AIDS (CRN+). Simon commented:“Having a place at the table [for CRN+] from the very beginning helped keepthe needs of persons living with HIV, their families, their loved ones and theircommunities at the forefront of the regional response”.Posters like this one inTrinidad capture people’sattention. Such awarenessraisingwas essential in aregion that had the secondhighest prevalence rate ofHIV in the world.UNAIDS/B.PressWith an overarching goal to ‘curtail the spread of HIV/AIDS and to reducesharply the impact of AIDS on human suffering and on the development ofthe human, social and economic capital of the region’, PANCAP broughttogether governments of all countries and territories in the region, regionaland international organizations in the fields of health, education, development,culture and other sectors, networks of people living with HIV,bilateral and multilateral organizations, the private sector, religious bodiesand others. It functions as a network that encourages each partner to workwithin its own mandate and areas of comparative advantage, while fosteringan environment for partners to pursue their respective programmes in acoordinated fashion.32Global Fund website, 2007. History of the Global Fund.