Contacts:
In Washington:
Beldina Auma-Owuor (202) 458-7307
Baumaowuor@worldbank.org
Stevan Jackson (202) 458 5054
Sjackson@worldbank.org
Aby Toure (202) 458 8302
akonate@worldbank.org
WASHINGTON, March 15, 2005—The World Bank today approved a US$20 million grant to step up the fight against HIV/AIDS in the six countries of the Great Lakes region— Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda—which are home to more than six million people living with HIV/AIDS, and more than three million children orphaned or made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS.
The new project—The Great Lakes Initiative on HIV/AIDS (GLIA) Support Project—will finance prevention, care, and treatment, programs for large numbers of refugees, migrant and transport workers, highly infected groups, and others which move between the five Great Lakes countries, with a strong emphasis on coordinating a regional, cross-border response to combating the disease.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which will receive funding from the new grant to widen its HIV/AIDS work in refugee camps in the region, estimates there are six and a half million refugees and internally-displaced people in the Great Lakes area, not counting people returning home from other countries.
“Addressing HIV/AIDS solely on a country-by-country basis ignores large-scale migration across long, unguarded borders, and other regional realities, and misses an opportunity to make national programs more effective through trans-national cooperation,” says Keith Hansen, Manager of the World Bank’s Multi-country HIV/AIDS Program for Africa, which has committed over US$ 1 billion in grants, loans, and credits to 29 Africa countries since September, 2000. “This project will add greatly to the reach and impact of national HIV/AIDS resources and programs in a region of the world where HIV/AIDS has caused so much human misery and loss.”
The region’s large numbers of people living with HIV/AIDS are straining national economies as well as health systems, which can offer only limited access to treatment for both AIDS and ‘opportunistic’ illnesses, such as tuberculosis. HIV/AIDS is dramatically fueling a regional TB epidemic with up to 75 percent of TB patients in some countries co-infected. This is a particularly serious problem amongst displaced people in the region who are living in extremely difficult conditions. For example, four countries in the region (Kenya, DRC, Tanzania and Uganda) are amongst the nine highest TB burden countries in sub-Saharan Africa.Economies in the region are among the poorest in Africa, with average per capita earnings of $208. Traditional coping mechanisms of families and communities are already overburdened.
What the new project will do:
Its first component—HIV/AIDS support to refugees, affected areas surrounding the refugee communities, internally displaced people, returnees (US$8 million)— will provide prevention, care, treatment and mitigation services to a mutually agreed number of people in these groups which are vulnerable to the disease.
The second component—Support to HIV/AIDS related networks (US$3 million)—will concentrate on reaching long-distance transport workers, communities and groups associated with them, as well as networks of people living with HIV/AIDS.
The third component –Support to regional health sector collaboration (US$3 million)—will help to harmonize regional HIV/AIDS-related health sector policies and protocols across the six Great Lakes countries, along with sharing program information, monitoring and evaluation, and training and pilot activities.
Pamphile Kantabaze, Project Co-Task Team Leader and a Senior Operations Officer in the World Bank’s Burundi Mission notes “we will only have concerted national success if there is cooperation, knowledge sharing and policy harmonization across borders. With limited financial and human resources to deal with the enormous HIV/AIDS tasks we collectively face in the Great Lakes, this collaboration is vital to all.”
The fourth component—Management, capacity strengthening, monitoring and evaluation and reporting (US$6 million)—will help strengthen the institutional capacity of the Great Lakes Initiative on HIV/AIDS (GLIA), a regional secretariat first set up in 1998, with the assistance of the Joint United Nations Program on AIDS (UNAIDS), to pilot a small number of cross-border activities between the six countries. The GLIA governments recognize the need to go beyond these modest efforts to create coordinated programs and policies to better fight their HIV/AIDS pandemics.
Consequently, GLIA will coordinate regional resources, merge regional HIV/AIDS approaches with national efforts, and monitor and evaluate these regional efforts.
“GLIA is a new regional organization, fully-owned, and will be operated by its six member countries. Designed to deal with HIV/AIDS operational issues as well as policy, the coming together of these countries to fight a common enemy—the HIV virus—is a historic event for the Great Lakes region, their people, and for the World Bank.” says Richard Seifman, Project Co-Task Team Leader, and a Senior Adviser in the World Bank’s AIDS Campaign Team for Africa.
The new GLIA project is the third cross-border, regional program approved under the World Bank’s Multi-country HIV/AIDS Program (MAP) for Africa in the last eighteen months.
In August, 2004, the African Regional Capacity-Building Network for HIV/AIDS Prevention, Treatment, and Care project provided a US $ 10 million grant to finance expanded training and training capacity of healthcare workers in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.
In November, 2003, the Bank approved a US $16.6 million grant to finance HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care services for at risk groups along the heavily-traveled Abidjan-Lagos corridor in western sub-Saharan Africa. The HIV/AIDS Abidjan-Lagos Transport Corridor project is working to reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS among transport workers, migrants, commercial sex workers and local people living along the corridor. By complementing national AIDS programs in the Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria, the project focuses on HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care services in border towns and communities in this sub-region of western Africa. UNAIDS estimates that approximately 3 million people travel along the transport corridor each year.
For more information on the World Bank’s work in sub-Saharan Africa visit: http://www.worldbank.org/afr For more information about this project visit: http://web.worldbank.org/external/default/main?pagePK=64002413&piPK=64002405&theSitePK=258644&menuPK=258672&Projectid=P080413 For more information on AIDS reporting, visit: www.aidsmedia.org -###- |
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