HIV campaigners lobby UK Government in Parliament Square

Parliament Square was transformed by a huge AIDS awareness ribbon on Thursday made of 5,700 carnations, representing the number of people who die from AIDS-related diseases every day.

HIV campaigners turned up to lobby 64 members of parliament, including Douglas Alexander, Secretary of State for International Development, pictured left.

The event was part of the Stop AIDS Campaign’s "If Not Now, When?" campaign asking the UK Government to show leadership in the fight against HIV/AIDS through its forthcoming three-year AIDS strategy. AMREF is an active member of the coalition, alongside other non-governmental organisations and trade unions.

The campaign is asking the UK Government to:  

Finance Universal Access: Commit at least £2.5bn over three years to ensure that the UK pays its fair share of global resources needed to achieve Universal Access by 2010.

Reduce the prices of essential medicines: promote generic medicines by tackling trade barriers and developing a patent pool for essential medicines

Strengthen Health Systems: Address the health worker shortage and provide long-term financing to strengthen services and infrastructure.

AMREF is focussing its efforts on the third part of the campaign calling for strengthened health systems. Sarah Hall, AMREF UK’s advocacy manager says: "African countries will never be able to effectively tackle HIV/AIDS without robust health systems. Firstly, we need to address the acute health worker shortages. It’s no good just increasing the number of anti-retroviral drugs available. We need to increase the number and skills of qualified health workers who are able to administer them."

She adds: "Funding for training and supporting community health workers must also be a priority, as they have a major part to play in educating people about HIV/AIDS and providing frontline care and support.

To increase the number and skills of health workers in Africa and to improve the health services and infrastructure, the campaign is calling for the Department for International Development (DFID) to lead on delivering support for 10-year national health plans and to increase bilateral budget support to the health sector.

Sarah Hall says: "AMREF would like to congratulate DFID for the commitment it has shown to tackling HIV/AIDS in Africa so far, but it needs more long-term sustainable investment to enable Africa’s weak health systems to deal with the massive burden of HIV/AIDS. This new strategy is a key opportunity for the UK Government to shape the global response to the epidemic and in turn, increase developing countries' chances of meeting health-related Millennium Development Goals by 2015."