UNAIDS: The First 10 Years

UNAIDS The First 10 Years44of characters, a lot of people who nobody else would have signed on to the UN systembut we did, and I think that was good”.It was decided to launch UNAIDS at the UN in New York on World AIDS Day, 1 December1995. The event was not a success, despite considerable efforts by UNAIDS staff. Piotwas to make a speech in the ECOSOC chamber in the main UN building, with an invitedaudience of all the delegations and the public in the gallery upstairs. Boutros-Ghali spoke,and a number of celebrities had been invited including Elizabeth Taylor and some operasingers from the Metropolitan Opera House.Sadly, explained Cowal, it was not the high-profile success hoped for. “The UN never hadtheir act together, they never managed to tell security they were expecting the publicso nobody could get in. It always said something to me … that’s how it started, with novisibility on either the organization or the crisis which had caused the organization tocome into being”.UNAIDS wasconfrontingthe challengeof perhaps themost seriousepidemic knownto humankind andit needed all thesupport that hadbeen committedfrom within theUN system.Anne Winter had joined UNAIDS as Communications Chief a month or so before thelaunch. “In the beginning, it was quite a struggle to get media attention. It was anunknown organization with an unknown boss. You’d ring journalists and they’d say, ‘What?’‘Who?’”However, that visibility was not the major struggle facing the new organization. UNAIDSwas confronting the challenge of perhaps the most serious epidemic known to humankindand it needed all the support that had been committed from within the UN system. Butthat support was not forthcoming.“My impression is that UNAIDS was disabled from the start”, concluded Merson, “becausethe donor governments did not insist that all the UN agencies behave responsibly. I sat inthe room with Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali and heard every one of them [the headsof agencies] commit themselves fully to the establishment of UNAIDS. But then there arethe governing boards of the agencies, the Member States. We can criticize the agenciesbut where were the governments that had pushed so strongly to have UNAIDS created?Once UNAIDS was established, why didn’t they follow on and make of it what it wassupposed to be? I’m talking in particular about the rich countries that highly influence thegoverning boards of each agency. Why didn’t they hold the agencies more accountablefrom the outset? Why did some of them provide fewer resources to UNAIDS than they hadto the WHO Global Programme on AIDS?”The Five Year Evaluation of UNAIDS (published in 2002) commented: ‘A significant pointis that there was no global consensus from which the joint programme emerged. Unlike