HIV & AIDS-A Deep Human Concern

10.45, Michael Kelly, Zambia, AIDS and
Children: Provocation. I have been asked
to make presentations, to give lectures, to
give opinion pieces and so forth, but it was
the first time I was ever asked, deliberately,
to provoke an audience of over 900 people.
So I am going to continue with that this
evening: I am going to provoke. Some words
and ideas that might help all of us to sit up
and think differently and even think better in
a world with AIDS, but also a world with TB,
with malaria, and so many other illnesses
and sicknesses, some of them preventable,
almost all of them curable.
As we do so, we might be able to reflect
on a few other aspects of our work. I want
to go back a little bit to 2005, to the
Paris Declaration 2 , where the big money
players in the world came together with
other countries to consider what would be
the best strategy to use in coordinating
and harmonising the use of aid, so that
foreign aid donors were not tripping over
one another. They came out with what
they called the “Three Ones”: that there
should be one national coordinating
authority, that there should be one national
framework for action, and that there should
be one monitoring and evaluation system.
That seemed to satisfy the donors, that
everything would be hunky-dory, but back
in Zambia, when this was being put into
practice, a number of us came together and
we said there was something missing. We
needed something else. We need a “Fourth
One”: that there should be one coordinated
and acknowledged voice from Civil Society,
2 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, acting as a practical, action-oriented roadmap to improve the quality of aid
and its impact on development.
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