UNAIDS: The First 10 Years

Chapter 481Participants at theCosponsor Retreat,hosted by UNESCO inVenice, March1998.UNAIDSCosponsors – striving to achieve collaborationIn an article for Science 14 , Jonathan Mann, former Director of the Global Programme on AIDS(GPA), told the journalist Michael Balter that getting the Cosponsors to work together was oneof the trickiest parts of the job for the Executive Director: ‘… like walking six cats on a leash’.The Executive Director’s presentation to the sixth Programme Coordinating Board (PCB)meeting in Geneva in May 1998 summed up the situation clearly: “We are seeing a majortension at country level between the urgency of action on AIDS and the sometimes slowpace of the UN reform process. In Theme Groups where consensus is hard to reach, UNAIDSfaces a tough choice between operating at the pace of consensus – and losing credibilitywith the host government and the more active Cosponsors – and choosing one Cosponsor’sviews over another’s, which complicates our relationships”.Nevertheless, the 1997 Theme Group assessment showed some progress since the 1996report. About half the Theme Groups surveyed had put together an integrated work planin which they charted a course for working together to support host countries in expandingthe AIDS response.Individual Cosponsors contributed in different ways. Mark Malloch Brown, former DeputySecretary-General of the UN, remembered his first visit to Southern Africa in 1999 as thenew Administrator of UNDP. He recalled seeing villages that looked as though they’d been“hit by the slave trade, because adults of an economically active and sexually active phaseof their lives were gone, leaving villages of grandparents and kids”. This image stayed withMalloch Brown as he reorganized UNDP into a series of ‘practice areas’, including AIDS, thebetter to focus its work.14Balter M (1998). ‘United Nations: global program struggles to stem the flood of new cases’. Science, 280.