UNICEF campaign: The Irish Government is to become the world's first government to commit up to 20 per cent of its overseas development funding for HIV, on specifically benefiting children, the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has announced.
Mr Ahern was speaking yesterday at the unveiling by UNICEF, of a major global campaign to tackle HIV and children. The $55 billion campaign, Unite For Children, Unite against AIDS, will be announced internationally in New York this morning by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
The damage being done by HIV in Africa was "truly frightening", Mr Ahern said.
The Government currently gives €50 million towards helping combat the HIV/Aids epidemic. Mr Ahern said the Government would ensure that 20 per cent of this or €10 million would go on interventions which benefit children who are affected by HIV or AIDS.
Maura Quinn, executive director of UNICEF Ireland, said the organisation had not put such emphasis on a single issue since its immunisation campaign in the 1980s.
The initiative was conceived in Dublin a year ago and proposed in New York late last year. It aims to put $55 billion into confronting the Aids pandemic among children over the next three years.
Less than one-third of these funds have so far been raised. Some $22 billion will be needed in 2008 alone.
The campaign will focus on 54 countries, 85 per cent of which are in sub-Saharan Africa, though Ms Quinn stressed the crisis in India, China and parts of eastern Europe were escalating at a rate that if left unchecked, would overtake Africa.
The campaign had hugely ambitious targets, she agreed. Among them is that the proportion of the world's women with HIV who have access to treatment be increased from 10 per cent to 85 per cent by 2010 and that the proportion of children with HIV who have access to treatment be increased from 10 per cent to 80 per cent by 2010.
Preparatory work had been done with organisations such as Oxfam and World Vision, as well as with governments. She said: "It's about time UNICEF showed some leadership on this. We are not proud that it has taken us so long. So we are going to be held accountable on these targets and if we haven't met those targets then we will have failed utterly."
According to the campaign report, almost 1,800 children under 15 are infected each day mostly through mother-to-child transmission. There are 6,000 new infections among the 15 to 24 age-group and 1,400 children die of Aids.
Twenty years into the pandemic fewer than 10 per cent of pregnant women with HIV get treatment; less than 10 per cent of children orphaned by Aids get help with such basic needs as feeding themselves and less than one-third of women age 15 to 24 in Sub-Saharan Africa know how to avoid HIV.
The pandemic is robbing these countries of parents and children, and also of teachers, builders, doctors, nurses, community leaders and, consequently, of hope, said Ms Quinn.
