UNAIDS: The First 10 Years

Chapter 3Bertozzi also talks about the challenges of the reduced funding. He recalled a group sittingaround Piot’s kitchen table and being involved in the initial design. “We certainly had thesense we could be leaner and meaner. There was this sort of cowboy sense in the team thatwe were going to have a new way of doing things; that we were going to be able to bemore effective per person and therefore more cost-effective and therefore in need of fewerresources. Perhaps everyone underestimated the speed at which mainstreaming could occurwith fewer resources. In retrospect, it was unrealistic and in some ways cruel for the donorsto expect that UNAIDS would suddenly catalyse all this mainstreaming that would magicallybe squeezed out of the regular budgets of the Cosponsors”.71Throughout its short life, UNAIDS has had to deal with the fact that a very diverse group ofpeople and organizations have great expectations of what it can and will do. Inevitably, itdisappoints some and pleases others at different times. Not only is there a lack of understandingabout the ‘nature of the beast’ – the Joint and Cosponsored Programme – thereis also a lack of understanding about how the UN works and of its constraints. South Africanactivist Zackie Achmat explained this very well: “I come from a tradition where internationalsolidarity has always played a critical part in work such as the anti-Apartheid movementand the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). So for me, international organizations are veryimportant”. But he, too, is sceptical about the UN system because he believes the “powerstructure globally prevents the UN from fulfilling its mandate … [for] achieving universalhuman rights”.