UNAIDS: The First 10 Years

Chapter 4technical standards and encourages a joint goal and joint vision. The role of the Secretariatis to inspire and meld a wide variety of partners together”.77Sally Cowal, Director of External Relations at UNAIDS, recalled: “We were beginning toget agreement on what sort of modelling [there] should be and therefore how you couldcome up with figures. So that was an early and rather signifi cant achievement”.“In UNAIDSthere wasn’treally anyother game intown, we hada clear goal”.Rob Moodie, Director of UNAIDS’ Country Support department, agreed: “The epidemiologyteam rose above turf wars among academic and other groups, working towards acommon good. They understood there’s a higher and more common good and also [they]had better connections across the agencies”.Statistician Neff Walker joined the UNAIDS epidemiology unit in early 1998: “You couldstart with a fresh slate. I think UNAIDS is one place where the hope that AIDS would bemultidisciplinary, that different organizations would work together and share and agreeon common approaches, really worked out [because there wasn’t any past history toovercome]”. He has noticed a difference in working with estimates for child survival ormortality where there are several competing groups: “In UNAIDS there wasn’t really anyother game in town, we had a clear goal”.UNAIDS strongly supported and worked with networks of positive people, including theNetwork of African People living with HIV/AIDS and the Asia-Pacific Network of People livingwith HIV/AIDS. Kaleeba was at the forefront of this work and, looking back, she said one of thebest things UNAIDS has done is to persuade countries “kicking and screaming” to involvepeople living with HIV. If UNAIDS had not insisted that“… your strategic plan is incompletewithout civil society”, she said, “many countries would not have involved them”.In collaboration with the United Nations Volunteers (UNV), the United Nations DevelopmentProgramme (UNDP) and the Network of African People living with HIV, UNAIDS supportedpilot projects in Malawi and Zambia where positive people served as United Nations (UN)volunteers. These volunteers were placed in government ministries and nongovernmentalorganizations. “The primary objective … [was] to increase the effectiveness of nationalprogrammes by ensuring that the expertise and knowledge of those most directly affectedcontribute to national policy development” 10 . It also gave HIV ‘a human face’ and aimedto reduce stigma. As a result of such a placement in a hospital in Malawi, for example, thenumber of people seeking an HIV test and returning for the results more than doubledduring the year of the project because they had met a healthy, positive person workingthere.The Greater Involvement of People living with HIV/AIDS (GIPA) Workplace Project in SouthAfrica was the result of a partnership between UNAIDS, UNDP, UNV and WHO, and some10UNAIDS (1997). Progress Report, 1996–1997. Geneva, UNAIDS.