UNAIDS: The First 10 Years

UNAIDS The First 10 Years84Government of Pakistan through the National AIDS Control Programme, the World Bankproject designed to support the national response to AIDS included a significant componentfor a comprehensive approach to HIV infection among drug users”.“And, in what I think is a very good example of a public-private partnership, the Governmentof Pakistan, using the World Bank project financing, basically outsourced the entire harmreduction effort in the province of Punjab to Nai Zindagi and its partner nongovernmentalorganizations”.Schoultz considered that this was “… an example of how the UN can take a very smallamount of catalytic funding and, working through strategic partnerships, turn that into a verybig difference in the way a nation responds to a particular issue – and harm reduction, as weall know, is a very controversial issue globally. But despite this controversy, Pakistan movedforward quickly and pragmatically and with relative success because, I believe, of the way itwas handled from the very beginning. One of our primary roles as the UN is to be bringers ofknowledge and bringers of innovation and I think that the story of harm reduction in Pakistanis an example of doing exactly that”.“The idea is,nobody’s toorich not to needsupport or toopoor not to offersupport”.Horizontal collaborationCompared with the GPA, which sent out hundreds of foreign consultants to advise ministriesof health, the UNAIDS Secretariat had limited technical assistance resources to offer tocountries. In a radical departure from the consultancy route, the UNAIDS Secretariatpromoted a strategy of strengthening and supporting technical resource networks (that is,of consultants and institutions offering technical support) within regions and countries. Thiswas also a way to strengthen institutional capacity within countries and to promote countryownership, as opposed to imposing ideas and experts from the North.The most successful example of such assistance was the Horizontal Technical CollaborationGroup, established by national AIDS Programme Managers in Latin America and theCaribbean to facilitate collaboration on issues such as epidemiology, care, counsellingand national strategic planning. “It was based on exchange of ideas and [the principle of]equality”, explained Luiz Loures, a physician and public health specialist who had workedfor the National AIDS Programme in Brazil and then joined UNAIDS in 1997, and who is nowAssociate Director for Global Initiatives. “The idea is, nobody’s too rich not to need supportor too poor not to offer support”. UNAIDS supported this initiative from the start, and todaymore than 25 countries are involved in the Horizontal Technical Collaboration Group.Prevention of mother-to-child transmissionOne of UNAIDS’ challenges was to clarify its catalytic role in policy making and programmaticwork in order to determine how it could best mobilize the UN system’s collectiveresources – for example, in supporting the scaling up of care, counselling and health